


fiat lux

by rfeyra



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: A Doctor a Courier and a Rusty Bucket, Arcade Is Not Gonna Break a Heart in This One, Banter, Developing Friendships, Enclave Remnants Family, Fluff and Humor, Gen, M/M, People to Save and Stories to Share, Retelling, Slow Burn, Some Food to Consume As Well, The Courier Is the Goodest Boy, Wasteland Tourism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-02-10 08:02:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 46,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18656311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rfeyra/pseuds/rfeyra
Summary: Every decent Follower of Apocalypse ought to do several things in their life and neither of those is wander about the dangerous wasteland alongside a chucklesome postman and his glitchy eyebot. Arcade never considered himself particularly decent, be it his Enclave heritage or chiefly unforthcoming demeanour.There are lots of people to save in the Mojave, however, and quite a few stories to share other than one's power-armored skeletons in the closet.





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> In many respects the fic is a retelling of Arcade's and ED-E's companion storylines as well as a bunch of side quests. It contains a lot of quotes from the game itself most of which are mixed up and integrated in the story. I do not own any of these or the characters, etc. I took a significant amount of liberty in manipulating the details of the game to make the fic look a bit more genuine but the carcass is the same and I made sure to cram as many game elements in as I could. Besides, plotwise I chose not to include most of the add-ons and companions in the story. 
> 
> Many thanks to Josh Sawyer for creating this idealistic ever grumbling treasure of Enclave former glory. There may be fewer chances for Arcade's joyous future in-game than he absolutely deserves but this fic is gonna make sure that he - per some aspera ad astra - does his best and eventually cobbles his happiness together. Perhaps a certain Courier gets to be a part of it in the end. 
> 
> English is not my native language, so I will be extremely grateful for pointing out any kinds of mistakes. I might or might not be overusing commas for the same reason :)

 

··−· ·· ·− − ·−·· ··− −··−

 

It had been almost seven months since Arcade arrived in Nevada. The Mojave did not seem entirely miserable at first, besides, he never considered the NCR a home anyway. He knew that the family lived close by: they had been maintaining correspondence, although less often since he had joined the Followers years ago. He could easily visit two of them any time he felt like a small family reunion.

It was not the best time to miss the rest as long as Arcade was confined in the Old Mormon Fort of his own free will while conducting a lost case research on every sample he managed to lay his hands on. Producing medication was an exceedingly stronger suit of his than healing patients. Those tended to be living, breathing and for some reason always trying to strike up a conversation.

For the first two months he had been motivated to help the people of Freeside, to lend a hand with curing New Vegas until the Legion was finally destroyed. He was aware of the idealism he shared with his colleagues, widely varying in healthy pragmatism even here, so far away from the Boneyard and the headquarters. Turned out that the NCR itself made it anything but easy to care for people who needed help.

Arcade used to have troubles comprehending it until he finally got to visit the Strip.

Needless to say, giving up was not an option. Thus the useless research continued while the visitors and the doctors of the old fort alike merely provided a muffled background for his pondering. Julie watched over him closely since they shared both the research tent and a rickety bunk; each night it wobbled as she climbed on the upper mattress.

By the sixth month Arcade was making no effort to conceal his languish and he was grateful to her for paying little attention.

There were plenty of unfortunate people to tend to in outer Vegas and never enough Followers to help. Visitors in the old fort were not uncommon, particularly so since Julie managed to establish a flow of medical supplies from some group in southern Freeside, but he generally avoided them altogether. It was a thoroughly developed strategy and it proved to work like a charm until one day the gate swung open and an eyebot floated in.

It was hard to ignore the presence of an Enclave remnant, although a non-sentient one, and especially - the one that could have easily been reprogrammed by any individual skilled enough in computer science. Its presence made him uncomfortable, much more so than Julie who promptly left the tent to greet the presumably skilled individual.

To his genuine surprise, it wasn’t a stranger. He had seen the man before, a few months ago and then once or twice when he stayed in the old fort. They even talked once but the man did not make much of an impression. He looked tired.

Arcade stared at him for a short while and reluctantly went back to his research - interesting person or not, a working eyebot undoubtedly armed with a cannon or two would definitely attract attention to both of them.

The eyebot stayed, much to his discontent. It was easy to spot its master’s presence now that he was constantly followed by a floating monument of Enclave’s past technological superiority. The beeping made Arcade jumpy but both the eyebot and the man came and went and before he knew it the beeping ceased for a couple of peaceful weeks.

He came back beaten and limping and Julie took pity on him. She said the man was a courier but Arcade neither knew much about the Mojave Express nor cared enough to ask about it. Resourceful hirelings were an inherent part of the dangerous wasteland outside the city yet unsurprisingly most of them did not survive for long.

This one differed somehow. He did not look tough except for the arsenal he carried - the courier got a bunk next to the only two working hot plates in the old fort so he could not be avoided unless one wanted to die of dehydration. Arcade walked in on him stripping a sniper rifle almost the length of the bunk the same day he arrived. It was already getting dark; the light of the Pip-boy on the man’s arm coloured the whole tent greenish.

He had to stay till the water boiled so he sat down at the small table and listened to the sharp sounds of a heavy rifle being taken apart and idle beeping of the eyebot scratching the fabric ceiling with its antennas.

The courier heedfully stretched his injured leg on the edge of the bunk and propped the rifle in his lap, leaving a whole lot of space next to him to put the parts on; Arcade noticed dirty bandages sticking out from the large tears in his pants. He did not mean to stare, but the man was skillful and the process was rather contemplative.

Then the courier looked up at him and carefully collected his features into a faint smile. In the greenish light he looked very ailing and even more tired than usual.

“Hey, doctor Arcade,” he said. “How’s your research?”

Arcade wouldn’t know why the man remembered so he just crossed his arms and eluded the question as he usually did. “Ongoing, strangely enough. Check in again in another decade, I am rather enthusiastic about the results. Now, I see you made a friend.”

The courier pointed a finger at the eyebot. “That’s Eddie. He’s some sort of a robot, zaps from the distance.” Arcade snorted at that. Some sort of a robot… Thankfully, the courier misunderstood his reaction. ”He’s mostly harmless unless shot at, don’t worry.”

“Where did you get it?” Arcade asked. He tried his best to sound vaguely curious.

“In Primm. It’s a town in southwest, maybe you’ve heard?.. A guy at Mojave Express spotted him at some dump, so I, uh, I tinkered with him a tad while I was there. I’m pretty nifty at repairs, less so at all that RobCo nonsense… wouldn’t know how to operate him but I figured out some basic commands.” The man shrugged. “He’s good.”

Arcade could feel his eyebrows swiftly raising above the glasses rim in surprise. “Good for you, then,” he finally uttered.

The water finally boiled so he made a polite escape since they did not have to go back to the conversation.

The courier stayed around for almost a week. He couldn’t wander off since he was still very weak and walking hurt him - Arcade saw him limping heavily across the yard - and there was hardly anything to do for him around the old fort except clean his weapons and bother Beatrix, the ghoul mercenary, with questions. She did not look very bothered, however.

He greeted Arcade whenever they happened to come across each other in the camp but the conversations did not last. Julie even invited him to their tent once, to change his bandages and check on the wounds up close.

“You got lucky,” she murmured in the process. “If you hadn’t reached the clinic on time or any of these got infected, doubt even doctor Usanagi could’ve helped you. Don’t be so very careless next time.”

The courier sighed. “Had to get real unlucky first… Uh, thanks for all your help, Julie. Much appreciated.”

“You did a lot for us, H,” she said and they both fell silent.

Arcade heard only his uneven footsteps on the way out and when he turned around on his chair Julie was still inside, pushing blood-stained bandages in the almost full metal container for future sanification. She tittered. “What, you interested in what’s been happening in our den?”

She didn’t mean to scorn him, of course: Julie’s good-hearted nature opposed it, albeit she undoubtedly found his lack of sociability rather funny. She made sure to keep him updated even though the news spread rapidly in their tiny community. They weren’t close but he was closer to her (at least physically, sharing the research space and the bunk) than to the rest of the Followers in New Vegas.

“Perhaps,” he answered vaguely after a brief pause. “Not in that friend of yours if that’s what you’re getting at. Was he the one who found the suppliers for you?”

“Yeah. He’s a resourceful fella and tries to help, unlike many who end up here.” Julie closed the container’s lid and put it back under the table with a loud thump. “Be nice to him, maybe he’ll stick with us.”

Arcade chuckled. “Julie, you wound me. I am the most forthcoming person in this facility, if not whole Nevada.”

“That you are,” she replied and went back outside, silently covering the tent entrance behind her.

Field chemistry was a weird occupation in comparison to the work at the laboratories back in the Boneyard. The work Arcade had been doing would have been called pharmacy in the Old World yet nowadays, if asked, he would describe it as randomly shoving all the available specimens into tubes and flasks in varying proportions, exposing those to random effects and making notes of the results.

He used to be a bit careless at first but started taking more precautions after one of such experiments melted a sizeable hole in his lab table.

Most of the data that was stored on their terminal dated back to before the bombs fell, some of it was more recent, created and carefully maintained by the Followers’ researchers, and only a tiny fraction was the results of his own work. The vast majority of the latter was reporting the multitude of his failed attempts at creating a chemical substance capable of mending wounds, or at least soothing inflammations.

In addition - a more useful one perhaps even if not at all long-term - he made sure to list the so-called healing powders and similar herbal remedies prepared by most locals as well as the Legion soldiers from fresh ingredients. Much to his disappointment but not surprise, none of those were suitable for storage.

He had not started experimenting on biological samples yet, save for those unattached to living beings, and he was equally unmoved by rubbing potentially dangerous substances into experimental subjects like rats and his own or any other human parts.

The work was boring, or rather dreadfully demotivating for lack of any valid results, but Arcade knew what he was getting into when Julie first introduced their makeshift chemical laboratory to him. He usually stayed next to it or the derelict terminal for most of the days and left the tent around sundown to idly stare at the open gates while still contemplating the same dosages and compounds.

The old fort was always very quiet in the evenings and dead-silent at nights - the majority of the occupants had to wake up at dawn for work; the rest, in one way or the other, would rather run their errands during the daylight. The camp lacked electric light and there were only a couple of oil lamps and a burn barrel providing illumination for the guards so pretty much everybody who stayed up late huddled in the small patches of lit ground. 

During the week that the courier had spent in the old fort he had been one of the few who stayed up later than Arcade usually did since the work at the terminal did not require light and there was no necessity for him to get up early for it. Besides, he enjoyed the silence that always fell over the camp after sunset.

After several late-night encounters he was all but certain that the courier either could not sleep at all or was onto something. The first time Arcade caught the sight of him after dark he was wandering about the camp and straining his injured leg relentlessly. He only recognized the man because of the limp: it was swiftly getting better due to Julie’s effort but was still noticeable.

The second time he woke up in the middle of the night, his mouth as dry as the Mojave desert and both his and Julie’s bottles completely empty, and went to boil some dirty water to the relatively-safe-to-drink state. The lower bunk near the hot plates was vacant except for the sniper rifle carefully tucked into the worn-out bed roll but the eyebot was there, hovering near the tent ceiling and beeping periodically.

The third time he slipped outside for a moment and on his way back from the makeshift restroom spotted the courier sitting at the guards’ table next to the gate. It was locked for the night, and the bar looked untouched.

The man heard his footsteps and turned around. “Hey, Arcade. Wanna join?”

Arcade wavered before sitting down in the chair next to him. “Where is the guard?” he asked cautiously.

“I’m the guard,” the courier cracked a smile. “Beatrix’s gonna be gone for a few days. I’ve got trouble sleeping so I may as well help you guys out.”

“You do look rather forworn all the time,” Arcade noticed and the man snorted in reply.

“Not too shabby yourself, y’know.”

“It may have been mentioned once or twice, at separate occasions, by different men… I did not mean it like that, sorry. Merely voiced a medical concern, if you will.” He crossed his legs and started rolling down his shirt sleeves to button them up. “And since I have already sufficiently embarrassed myself… what should I call you?”

The courier was still looking at him with a grin. The bags under his eyes were so puff they could have easily been used as pillows, but he did not strike Arcade as sleepy.

“My name is H. But most just call me the courier, so if you hear something like that it’s gotta be about me. Used to work for the Mojave Express and all that.” His arm jumped up weirdly as if he was going to raise it but stopped abruptly.

Instead, he reached out a hand and offered Arcade a firm handshake. “Pleased to,” he said.

“Likewise. I haven’t heard much about any couriers out here but for fairness sake I haven’t been around for long.” To top that up, he had not been hugely interested in anything outside of Freeside, with the considerable exception of the war effort.

“Me neither. Few of us out there either way. I’d take any job if paid good. And not, well… I’m not okay with doing bad things, that’s all.” H shrugged.

“So you are not a mercenary. What’s the medical conclusion for the leg case then?” Arcade raised a brow inquisitively.

He had to admit that Julie was almost right before, he got curious: the courier was rather waggish and amusing enough to talk to. Quirky, perhaps, undoubtedly suspicious thus far and considering the eyebot not very intelligent but seemingly quick-witted. As the saying went, nemo sine vitio est.

“… in short.” H was saying embarrassedly. ”I got really lucky though, firstly ‘cause it was a small one, I mean in comparison with an adult deathclaw… hide softer, you don’t need a .50 caliber to penetrate it. And secondly ‘cause it didn’t chop a vein or something.”

“Arteria profunda femoris.” Arcade nodded. “It’s the deep artery of the thigh, tear that and you die in minutes. Hold on, aren’t you a sniper? How did it get so close to you?”

H let out a loud huff. “I’m a sniper, yeah. It was sleeping, I couldn’t see it through all the sandstorm. Smelled me out from several meters… The small ones are light brown, no way I could’ve spotted it. They aren’t supposed to roam so far from the quarries but guess that one wasn’t informed.”

“You are really lucky, then.”

“I get that a lot.” The courier tittered. “Doctor Usanagi is a nice gal, very skillful. Got me on both legs in a few hours. Still stumbly, but working. You guys really know your med stuff, the Followers. Are you a big thing back in the NCR?”

“We are. What you see here in Nevada is just a fraction, those silly enough to believe they could make a difference in the war,” Arcade smirked somewhat bitterly. “Quite noble in nature… Don’t get me wrong, I am very enthusiastic about helping people, we are a bunch of overly idealistic samaritans after all. Alas, all the parties involved are not making it easy for us. Leeching resources, limiting access to the safe havens for the rich, et cetera.”

He vaguely gestured in the direction of the Strip. H did not respond as if he was waiting for him to continue, so Arcade did. “We used to be a bigger thing before the NCR decided to go to war. We are not a military organization, all this imperialism does not mix well with our humanitarian mission as you can imagine... Some disagreed, so the NCR ended up creating its own Office of Science and Industry. Believe it or not, their focus is militaristic applications of science. Who would have thought.”

“That’s cheery.” The courier smiled. “Must be hard keeping that optimism in check.”

“In truth, I am exerting myself to the utmost, right here.” Arcade agreed.

He smiled back and they burst into laughter, hushed and a bit childish. It was brief but not entirely unpleasant. Then he shook his head and pushed the rim of his glasses up with one finger to rub the eyes.

“As optimistic as it is… well… We might have a chance at something better after all, thanks to you. Julie keeps saying we are much better off these days that the supply is steady, I’ll take her word for it. Thank you,” he said sincerely.

H looked taken aback for a moment. “Oh… don’t mention it, really. You guys keep doing what you’re doing. By the way, what was it you’ve personally been up to?”

“Medication ex nihilo. I’ve been researching different kinds of plants and biological samples from around the Mojave, trying to create some kind of pharmaceuticals from them.” Arcade explained. “To no avail so far.”

“Like the healing powder? For when the supplies run out?”

“Yeah. Exactly that, yes. Like the healing powder, but a more advanced one, suitable to be produced in large quantities and stored for later use.” He looked at the courier with silent approval. The man was surely quick-witted, or maybe he had already told him the same story. Arcade did not want to find out for now.

“You gotta need ingredients then, for your research, I mean. Animal stuff, maybe?” H asked much to his surprise. “I’m roving the Mojave most of the time, as long as I’m able to crawl back why not grab some for you?.. No charge, for the sake of science.”

Arcade hummed musingly and nodded. “That would be very helpful indeed. Just hold on to anything not very contagious, whatever you come across. I do not think we can afford being too picky around the wasteland. I haven’t seen much of it but I can guarantee you: few things out there have healing qualities. Not for humans, anyway.”

“Yeah, providing I don’t tread on another deathclaw any time soon.” The courier grinned.

“The science will not forget your heroism and neither will I.” Arcade assured him. “Then again, omnes una manet nox. The same night awaits us all.”

H looked so utterly confused for a moment that he was almost sure that he will have to explain the meaning, but then the man let out a soft ‘ah’ and his grin widened twofold.

“Wow, you are such a smartass.”

“It’s doctor smartass to you,” Arcade countered and in a sudden display of uncalled for amiability gave H’s shoulder a friendly pat. “Alright, have fun staring at the gate, I will be going back to bed. Get better soon, will you? Science cannot wait.”

“Aye aye,” the man echoed.

In the morning the allure of the conversation beneath the stars largely dissipated but the curiosity remained. Soon the courier and his eyebot left and the next time H returned to the old fort he delivered as promised and brought a weighty sack of various tagged entrails for the research along with a stack of already half-dried leaves.

It was something uncommon: Arcade would not expect a drifter to be so true to his word. He accepted the offering and made sure his smile conveyed only his gratitude, ne plus ultra.


	2. II/I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The second chapter had to be divided in two since I was unable to control its volume (or myself).

 

··−· ·· ·− − ·−·· ··− −··−

 

It did not take long for the courier to prove himself as a valuable purveyor. Most of the things that he usually came across in the wasteland were rare and their supply in Freeside was, to put it mildly, immensely scarce. Some of the specimens he provided even turned out to be previously unfamiliar to Arcade. It made the research a lot more entertaining, if not a tad promising.

After a couple of such deliveries he came to realize that he was awaiting the courier’s return, thanks to all the exciting samples that he brought in and perhaps because their banter somewhat started to grow on Arcade. H was… chucklesome and he - sometimes intuitively rather than intellectually - knew how to take his witty remarks.

Besides, he never stayed for long except for that week when his leg was crippled so Arcade never had a chance to tire of his company.

The problem was that even with a steady supply of entrails, limbs, hides and compound eyes of various mutated species it was almost impossible to study them properly in the field laboratory that Arcade and Julie had put together from scrap and what little they had brought from the NCR. The margin of error was enormous and inadmissible for any kind of medical research.

Thus he had been struggling with any way of studying the interesting specimens other than continued staring.

Julie unceremoniously kicked the back side of his chair during one of such meditations over a splayed piece of gecko liver. She was lazily flipping through another issue of 'Today's Physician' and nodded at the tent entrance when he turned around. “Hey, H.”

“Uh, hi, my good doctors.” The courier waved at them. “Hope I’m not intruding and if I am just tell me where to offload this and I’ll be on my way. Gotta go real fast.”

“Than-…” Arcade started and reached for the package.

H swiftly handed it over and darted off before he could finish the sentence. It probably meant that he would be right back later but he only returned the next morning carrying a full backpack of various canned preserves for the Followers’ relief work kitchen. He was not obliged to do it, of course, but he sometimes brought things from the northern gates that they could never get from ‘Mick and Ralph’s’, like canned meat or decent vodka for disinfection.

Arcade was sitting outside with a bowl of two hundred years old mac and cheese at that moment so H strode right up to him, heavily dropped the backpack on the ground and plopped down next to it. The eyebot - Eddie - idly followed him around.

“Had to go to the friggin’ Strip last night,” he complained with a sour expression. “Up the Lucky, but that’s okay, and then some errands. What you got there?”

“An unsavory sticky glop with a subtle hint of cheese overtones. Would you like some?” Arcade offered. “I am in possession of half a pack of this delight and I am willing to part with it at the earliest convenience.”

“Yums.” The courier chuckled. “Maybe later, thanks, ‘Cade.”

“Seriously though, take it if you want. I don’t think I will be able to cram any more in.” He sighed. “Makes you wonder whether the Old World society was as forward-minded as they keep saying.”

“Let’s see… it’s only been what, a hundred and eighty years since the expiry date? A real treat.”

Arcade arched a brow and looked down at the macaroni. “My delicate bowels can only handle a hundred and fifty, I’m afraid.”

H murmured something about pampered NCR doctors who never ever had to consume a raw bloatfly.

“Yeah, as if you had.” Arcade laughed.

“Not yet,” the courier replied with a wink.

They parted ways as soon as the glop was finished - Arcade returned to his lab to expose the gecko liver to a couple more chemicals and H went… somewhere. He didn’t stay in Freeside for the chitchat and he was absent during the days so he probably had some work to do, or find, or get paid for.

The next day they almost bumped into each other when Arcade, enraged by the total lack of any feasible results, rushed out of his tent to get fresh air and hopefully put some distance between himself and his accursed workspace.

“Whoa.” H took a step back and raised both hands in surrender. “Julie said you were there…”

“Sorry,” Arcade barked and covered his eyes with a sigh. It was hard to contain the roiling anger but he managed to calm down a little. “Sorry, I did not mean to be rude, it’s just... ugh. You know what, to hell with all that nonsense.”

He suddenly felt a firm hand on his shoulder. “Yeah, to hell with it.” H smiled. “Come on now. Gonna go to ‘Mick and Ralph’s’, tag along and tell me what’s bothering you.”

It was a good idea, actually. He needed to walk it off and wandering about Freeside with someone packing an arsenal was probably the safest way to stay out of trouble. Besides, the man was not a complete stranger. He sounded genuinely concerned.

The road to the shop usually took about ten minutes but Arcade only realized that they had been walking in circles when they passed by the old fort’s gates again and the guard outside greeted them automatically for the third time. He sighed and shoved both hands in the pockets of his Followers’ uniform coat.

“So.” H noticed the change and looked up at him. “What’s up?”

“That gecko liver you brought the last time, it's been driving me crazy. I am positive it has some potential but I do not have access to enough equipment to carry out proper tests and the tests I can carry out do not yield anything consistent. It’s maddening.” Arcade kicked an empty tin can out of his way vexedly; it rolled away with a clanky sound.

“I see… you wanna find a better lab then? There's gotta be a few out there,” the courier said.

“No. No, this is hardly worth the effort. And all the chemical labs… if there were any to begin with, they must have long been overrun by drug dealers. Thus, no point in surdo oppedere. A useless act, I mean.” He thought about it, however. The only useful solution would have been to send a package back to the NCR but the organs would never survive the trip and sending a living gecko all the way to California just to prove an unconfirmed hypothesis seemed unduly.

“Do they have geckos back in C?” H asked suddenly.

“I don’t think so but I like your train of thought.”

“Huh. Thanks, I guess.” They finally reached ‘Mick and Ralph’s’; the courier touched the handle and turned to him abruptly. “Look, I’m pretty sure you’re gonna figure some smart way to crack this out real soon. Just don’t go knocking your head against the same wall for too long, okay? You’ll break your glasses.”

Arcade let out a soft chuckle and pushed the door open. They were the only customers in the shop. He roamed about the room, studying the goods on the half-empty shelves under the unfaltering gaze of the shopkeeper while H was discussing something with Mick in the back. Arcade did not know the man personally and had never met him but he heard some things. It was not a secret that Mick was selling guns and other restricted things like ammo and grenades in the shop. It also was not hard to guess that ammo of a sniper rifle caliber was uncommon.

They returned to the old fort well before noon. H wavered at the entrance, crumpling the frayed strap of his backpack. “Off to work now?.. Gotta go clear my space, leaving today. Can I come by in, like, a quarter?” he asked.

Arcade nodded. “My door is open. It’s not like my tent has a door anyway.”

The courier was back even sooner; his and Julie’s voices reached the lab from the outside as if they were standing right next to the table laden by used up glassware and a couple of derelict burners. Arcade was never one to eavesdrop so he focused on wrapping up the latest liver experiment that he had so carelessly abandoned midway.

He had almost finished packing the leftover utensils into a sanitary container when the tent flap was drawn aside.

“I’ve got an idea,” H started. He leaned against Arcade’s table and propped an elbow against the terminal. The grip of his sniper rifle was sticking high above his shoulder once again.

Eddie was nowhere to be seen but Arcade could hear the eyebot’s beeping close by. He crossed his hands and nodded at the terminal. “Hands off the fragile equipment.”

“Yeah, yeah… sorry. So, I’m gonna head west this time, make a detour around the deathclaw territory.” The courier made a vague gesture somewhere south-east. “I'm thinking, why don’t you come with me?”

Arcade stared at him in disbelief for a long moment. H was looking at him expectantly so it swiftly became obvious that he was not joking. “No offence intended but why should I go anywhere else with you?..” Arcade rarely found himself at a loss for words but the odd invitation almost got him verging on rudeness.

“I mean, maybe that research of yours won’t progress much but from the looks of it you really need to clear the attic.” H shrugged. “I’ve got your back, I promise.”

“First of all, I am more than capable of holding my own.” Arcade made no effort to hide his discontent. “And secondly, I barely know you.”

“Yah, is that so?” The courier let out a guileless smile. Arcade’s displeasure did not seem to affect him in any way. “Let’s see. I’m okay-ish at surviving in the wasteland… Julie trusts me to help her people ‘cause I’m nifty and true to my word. Plus, I’m likely a decent shot, otherwise I wouldn’t carry ten extra kilos on my back. And I’ve got that thing when you can’t sleep much.”

“Insomnia.” Arcade sighed.

“That one, yeah. So, about that journey… you’d need a guide and I need a handsome doctor to keep me safe. Sounds fair enough for my part. What do you say?” H asked directly. He clasped his hands nervously; those were clad in mismatched mitts.

Arcade let out an amused hem. “Overt flirtation will get you everywhere, you know.” He studied the courier for a moment but the man had never been much of a sight so it was hard to deduct whether Arcade was going to regret his decision later.

He musingly drummed his fingers on the table. “Can’t say that I was expecting this, naturally, but well… tentanda via… If you are interested in helping out with the troubles plaguing New Vegas, I suppose I can come with you. And just as a warning: do not get your hopes up regarding any medical help. I meant it when I said that I was just a researcher.”

“Deal.” H beamed.

Given that Arcade did not have many personal belongings to begin with, let alone those useful in a walking tour, the arrangements took little time. He grabbed the Defender from his locker and a bunch of energy cells, checked if the pistol was still in good shape, pushed two bottles of purified water along with all of the Stimpaks and Med-X’s he owned into a crumpled bag and after a quick chat with Julie met the courier outside the gate.

They both turned to him simultaneously: H and his stupid eyebot. “Alright, I’m ready.” Arcade tried to leave no room for the second thoughts. “There are plenty of people out there to help, things to learn. Maybe not in that order, but let’s get to it.”

“That’s the spirit,” the courier encouraged. “Let’s go, we'll have time to chat on the road. I’ll show you the map when we’re out of NV, there’s a rest stop right next to ol’ ’95. They usually deal with the caravans but I’m okay with the NCR so they trade me water for… uh, basically for whatever. Mostly caps.”

The road through the outskirts of New Vegas made Arcade uneasy; things looked very, very dire - even miserable - out there, withering NCR farms and packed out refugees’ camps alike. They did not enter Aerotech but there were lots of its inhabitants hanging about outside the gate. All those people looked starving and sick. The Followers’ reach barely stretched out that far from Freeside: the doctors were few, the supplies were scarce. Those in need were many.

Arcade bit his tongue not to ask H to stop and help; even if he parted with all the supplies he was carrying it would not be enough. It did not feel just to go around helping individuals while their friends, or brothers in misfortune, or whatever, were left suffering. He sighed and looked away, and promised himself to find a way to aid when he got back.

The wasteland started taking over the rubble right where the overhead road came down to the ground and as far as Arcade could see the same barren landscape stretched forth for miles. There were no plants around except for occasional dried up weeds and ailing cacti, and no people. They came across a number of NCR patrols along the way but he was doubtful that the guards would actually rush to assistance of those in trouble if need were.

Neither of them breathed a word until they reached the rest stop H had mentioned. While he was talking to the traders Arcade stayed on the highway and studied the four billboards advertising the Strip casinos. New Vegas was designed to be such a tourist attraction for the wealthy; the majority of those who came to Nevada did not go past Aerotech. Very few had enough caps on them by the end of the journey to enter the Strip, even fewer were able to stay for long.

H densely packed two freshly filled water bottles into his half-empty backpack, shouldered it once again and joined Arcade on the road, poking at the Pip-boy screen. “Here, this is us. We’ll be going south down the ’95 all the way today,” he said and slid a finger along the crooked line on the screen. “We’re headed to Novac, it’s a motel. My friends live there, we can stay for the night and…” He followed the line further to the edge of the map and then northwestward. “… go west. The middle is all deathclaws, no passing through there.”

Arcade nodded. “And what is it that draws you to the west?”

“I’ve got a delivery or two to drop off along the way, regular stuff like letters. And we can stay in Goodsprings before heading back - they’re good people, helped me out a lot. I, uh, I owe them much. They’ll be glad to have us.”

“Seems like you have a lot of friends around the wasteland,” Arcade noticed.

“Less than enemies.” H turned the Pip-boy off and straightened the cable leading from it to his left mitt.

They went south down the road. Late January weather did not allow for much sun so it promised to be quite a pleasant walk up until the courier tried to strike up a conversation.

“So… how did you end up in the Followers?” he asked.

Arcade shrugged. “Oh, you know, the usual. I gave off the impression that I was not entirely dumb and I could use some education so the Followers accepted me for my looks. Turned out I was also good at lab work.”

“If you don’t wanna tell me it’s fine, really. No need to state the obvious.” H chuckled. “I took you in for the looks as well, didn’t I?”

“I’m actually pretty boring. Honestly, you’ll be disappointed.” Arcade attempted to deflect but the courier merely raised his brows under the weathered cap vizor. “Oh, all right… I suppose I could as well dole out… well, I was born west from here, obviously. I am thirty-ish… late thirties, in fact. I like medicine and helping people. And learning extinct languages barely spoken by academics before the War. I think that should cover most of it. Look, I appreciate that you are being friendly but I’d rather not discuss it.”

“How do you learn an extinct language?” H asked after a pause. “It’s… extinct.”

“Books. Sheet music. Gladiator movies holotapes,” Arcade listed. “All of the above plus bits and pieces here and there. Those cannot be found lying about in the wasteland, I’m afraid. The Followers’ libraries provided so I got interested… Wait, what was that again?..”

He took a few steps back and looked up at the billboard they had just passed. “REPCONN HQ Museum, that’s a welcome surprise. I have read about REPCONN. Do you think it's still open for public?”

H made an ambiguous gesture towards the museum. “We’re on a tour, aren’t we? Plus, I’m really deft with a lockpick.” The vizor securely concealed half his face when he was not looking up so Arcade could not be sure if the man actually gave him a wink but frankly speaking it would not slip out of character if he did.

They had to circle the whole building around to find the entrance. There were several functioning maintenance robots outside but they did not register the visitors’ presence. The doors were unlocked but it was dark inside. H turned his Pip-boy light on and it managed to illuminate almost half the hallway.

“So, what have you heard about REPCONN?” he asked inquisitively. “I know Mr. House-… I mean RobCo, that company with the Pip-boys and all the terminals and robots? They bought it for something.”

“I think they used to work with the… the government, from before the War. Rocket fuel and energy weapons prototypes, I think. That explains the rocket,” Arcade mused, studying a model exhibited in the middle of the hall.

Suddenly a Mr. Handy powered up and emerged from behind the counter. Eddie beeped loudly and they both jumped; H had the rifle propped against his shoulder almost as fast as Arcade unholstered the Defender. 

“Welcome to REPCONN Headquarters, Rocketeer! Come all this way to see our little facility, have you?” Mr. Handy approached them. It did not seem hostile, so they slowly put down their weapons. On second thought, firing a sniper caliber from such a small distance in a closed space seemed ill-advised anyway so H was probably - and hopefully - going to bash the robot with its bulky frame. 

“We… errr, yeah?” he mumbled. “You giving tours?”

The robot was quiet for a moment, then its speakers activated again. “Excellent, excellent! Please be patient, the tour will begin in just a moment.”

The courier turned to Arcade and they exchanged puzzled looks. A private tour around the abandoned facility was a rare occasion so when the guide headed to the doors on the left they silently decided to follow it. Some of the exhibits had already been plundered but the plaques remained. They wandered around the room while the robot was reciting its tour programme; H held his Pip-boy up to give them more light.

The tour was designed for children and the distinctive narration style quickly started getting on Arcade’s nerves but his companion seemed impassive. The plaques were funnier than the guide. ’REPCONN’s always looking to the future, and in our future, we don’t need to worry about radiation, health risks… ‘ Arcade smirked.

The next room contained rockets constructed by REPCONN that never got a chance to reach the space. The museum only housed scaled-down models, of course, but they were impressive nonetheless. Scientific discovery in space - it sounded promising, and exciting. Mixing fossil and plasma to create better rocket fuel only sounded dangerous, on the other hand.

“Wow, look!” H squeezed through the doors to the next room as soon as they started opening and rushed to the nearest stand. “Eddie, you’re an… an, what is it?.. An eyebot! Huh, he does look kinda like an eye, doesn’t he? Hey, Mr. guide, what’s an eyebot supposed to do exactly?..”

Mr. Handy bellowed in response and its processor started screeching loudly. Arcade hurried to cover his ears; it did no good but thankfully the programmed response was only a few sentences so they did not both go deaf by the time it died down.

“Ugh… sorry.” It was hard to hear H through all the residual ringing in the ears but the man looked guilty. He turned around and studied the eyebot exhibit. “This one looks kinda different though, don’t you think?.. It’s got a screen, uh and there’s no energy gun or armor plates. Whoa, Eddie really is a cool weaponized version or something? Must be from the military… not the NCR though. Weird.”

Arcade felt his mouth dry out in seconds and nervously cleared his throat. He needed to say something, distract H somehow, but he could not think of anything. One moment the man acted like the simplest ingenuous simpleton to ever walk the earth and the next he managed to be so damn quick on the uptake that it was bewildering.

“But cool.” Arcade uttered faintly.

“Yeah, pretty much,” the courier echoed, still studying the plaque next to the eyebot. “It says they can recognize the user and broadcast stuff… and then some nonsense about the president?.. What president?..”

“Oh, you know, dead guys, from before the War, nothing important,” Arcade mumbled. He may or may not have been sweating a little by that moment, and seriously, what a stupid idea it was to come to the damn museum to begin with, the place ought to be full of technology like that… Truth be told, Arcade forgot completely that RobCo had anything to do with either REPCONN or the Enclave and its eyebots. However, that fact did not warrant his stupid suggestion to loiter around peeking into every abandoned facility on the way.

He was saved by the Mr. Handy guide: the robot finished reciting the tour and headed to the next room while H was thoroughly comparing Eddie to the exhibit model. Arcade nudged him in the shoulder and pointed at the entrance. “The tour is up.”

The last room turned out to be a planetarium and if it was not for the deeply unsettling eyebot conversation Arcade would have loved the orrery with all his heart. He read about such models but never saw any of them in person; the one in California must have been levelled during the War and the NCR had no desire to salvage the parts from somewhere else. Astronomy was no one’s priority for the time being.

Thankfully, H did not look at the eyebot model once on their way back so Arcade let out a relieved sigh discreetly and kept it in mind to avoid the topic in the future. The robots never became hostile and the tour guide returned to the entrance hall and idly hovered in the middle so they freely exited through the main doors.

As soon as he felt out of the woods Arcade reached for a water bottle in his bag and almost halved it in one go. They returned to Highway 95, according to the weather-beaten sign near the intersection, and continued strolling south. H walked on silently and his eyebot floated right behind them, throwing an oddly shaped shadow on the battered paving. The road mainly went straight ahead and it was empty except for a bunch of Hoover Dam billboards scattered along it. Someone took time to paint ‘NCR AND PROUD!’ messages in white on each of those.

They reached an outpost in late afternoon. There was only a handful of people around and none decided to occupy the bar. H gestured at it suggestively and they sat down on rickety stools next to a mumbling radio. The place looked… tidy, especially for a stall in the middle of nowhere, and there was an NCR flag flying proudly above the tents.

Something reeked of burning close by but Arcade could not locate the source from his place at the makeshift counter. The barkeeper leaned out from behind the stall and waved a dirty spatula at them.

“Feeling thirsty?” he asked.

“Hungry,” H replied and sniffed at the air. “Whatever you’re grilling, I’ll have it.”

Arcade was not that ready to try his luck. “I would… prefer to know the origin first,” he admitted.

“Gecko stakes, mantis legs,” the barkeeper specified. “Steak five caps, legs nine ‘cause those ain't raiding our supplies nightly.”

“I’ll have a steak, please.”

“Both for me.” The courier nodded and turned around on his stool, studying the yellowish landscape spread out as far as the eye could see. His gaze shifted to the north where the Strip was safely hidden behind the hills and then back to Arcade. “You mentioned that REPCONN used to be a big thing before the War, right? Prototypes or something?”

He nodded. “Yeah, plasma rifles, they were intended to replace the P94 plasma caster. Mr. House bought REPCONN when its business was shaky and repurposed that plasma technology to a governmental weapon contract. Something to do with Poseidon Energy project SEMELE… It did not go anywhere as far as I know.”

“And how exactly do you know all this again?” the courier asked and rested a cheek upon his fist. “Just thinking.”

Arcade frowned. “Stop thinking so much. Thanks.”

H did not ask again and soon the barkeeper placed the smelly steaks in front of them on two pieces of cardboard. The mantis legs took longer to prepare; if Arcade did not know those were mantis legs he would have never guessed from the look of pale thin pieces of meat. There were no mantises around Freeside and hardly anyone would import those specifically to accommodate the Followers’ nonexistent food excesses.

The courier offered him a piece but it turned out to be basically tasteless.


	3. II/II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I give you the final part of chapter two. Arcade is having an eventful day.

 

··−· ·· ·− − ·−·· ··− −··−

 

They headed out as soon as the caps changed hands. The sun was still high but the scenery started to grow yellow little by little. The road took no turns and was just as empty as before: the only signs of intelligent life they had passed were a billboard with a sloppily painted ‘Boulder City’ arrow pointing east and a caravan coming their way down the parallel road. H exchanged a series of gestures with them along the way.

“What was that about?” Arcade asked out of sheer curiosity.

“They saw something straight ahead, hostiles, dangerous but not for us. I think it’s the ants, those usually nest close to the road in these parts, real pain in the ass for locals,” the courier explained. He pushed his cap up and rubbed the red imprint across his forehead.

They had been walking for about ten minutes when H stopped dead in his tracks. “There. See them?” He pointed at the road ahead. “Down the hill, next to a dead Brahmin?”

“Um, a Brahmin, where?.. Look, this may come as a surprise but there is a reason why I wear glasses,” Arcade muttered. It made the courier chuckle.

“No worries.” He dropped down on one knee and swiftly propped the rifle against his shoulder, cocking his head to the scope. The thing turned out to be rapid-fire: he fired four shots one after another - three at the road and one to the side - and never reloaded. “Done. Must be sluggish after the meal. Let’s go take a peek.”

“No offence intended but I would imagine a drifter to scavenge more,” Arcade mentioned along the way.

“Only on the road back. Won’t get much caps from selling junk to folks who can scrap the same in their backyard. So I only bother dragging good stuff around. Try outrunning a deathclaw with twenty kilos on your hump…” H shivered. “Snipey’s the best but it quickly becomes a burden to carry around anything but her and a pair of irons.”

Arcade looked down at the twin holsters on his thighs - the left one had been readjusted to hold a knife - and nodded. “I would think so.”

“If there’s real good loot lying around I strap it to Eddie,” the courier confessed and tapped on the side of the eyebot lightly. “That’s how he got the duct tape marks. It makes him zigzag a little, haven’t figured out if that’s ’cause of the weight or me covering his sensors.”

The dead Brahmin and three headless giant ants around it were splayed across the road in a rather disgusting display of vae victis; the fourth one completely blended into the wayside weeds.

“Brought you these already.” H poked the closest carcass with a boot, shrugged and stepped right over it. Arcade followed with a disgusted sigh.

The road lead forward in the direction of buildings barely visible in the distance. It was hard to discern the silhouettes yet but there was something peculiar about them so Arcade spent almost half the way staring at the horizon until his eyes hurt. When they passed another billboard - Helios One this time, whatever that was - the buildings appeared from behind it at a much closer distance and it became obvious that the odd shape towering over them was some sort of a statue.

“Is that… a dinosaur?” Arcade finally voiced his puzzlement.

“Yeah, that’s where we’re going.” H pointed at the statue. “It’s Dinky the D-something, he’s Pre-War, my friends work in his mouth. He’s like a motel tourist attraction in Novac, that settlement we’re off to.”

“Your friends work in its what?..”

“Mouth.” The courier smiled. “They’re guards, snipers. The NCR used to headshot Legion scouts from there just right. Now the locals do.”

They reached the motel when the sun was already settling down. The courier waved at the dinosaur and, much to Arcade’s surprise despite the previous explanation, someone leaned out of its maw to wave back at them. The statue was facing east and a wide angle from the west was left unguarded but from the looks of the settlement all the inhabitants appeared more than capable of defending their homesteads.

Apart from the large motel building behind the dinosaur there was only a handful of structures in Novac. On their way to the stairs Arcade counted four other houses excluding yet another Poseidon station crammed with REPCONN rocket models for an unclear reason. H kneeled down at the top of the staircase and started fumbling for something on the floor.

The search was not being very productive so Arcade leaned against the railing and looked around the motel. It surely was inhabited: there was no trash lying around and several windows were lit up from the inside. Novac seemed like a nice place to stay and probably would have been really expensive to settle in.

“Gotcha,” H announced. He turned the Pip-boy light off and pushed the door open. “Would hate to pick my own lock in front of a guest. Come in.”

“As long as I am not unknowingly trespassing I cannot be bothered less.”

The room looked a lot nicer than Arcade would have expected and very tidy - the sort of tidy that spoke volumes of its owner’s rare visits. Despite the variety of furniture it contained the only thing left in the open was a plastic dinosaur figure on a cabinet near the entrance. The poor dinosaur’s badly painted expression showed signs of excruciating agony. Arcade reached out to touch its white belly.

“People around here surely love their Dinky,” he said amusedly.

“Friendly advice, don’t bring him up before the locals unless you wanna hear a two-hour lecture.” H flopped his backpack on a nearby table and fished a water bottle out. “I mean, I suppose you’d rather not but if you wanna…” He quickly finished the water in several gulps.

“You live here,” Arcade stated pointedly. “Shouldn’t I rent a room?”

“Nah… be my guest. I stay outside most of the time anyway. Bathroom.” The courier pointed at the door in the back. “Water’s irradiated, some Rad-X in the medkit. I need to run a few errands before dark, those deliveries I mentioned? Tag along if you'd like to.”

H grabbed a sheaf of letters from the backpack and left it lying about but shouldered the rifle’s strap as usual. Arcade backed up from the door to give him space.

“I honestly do not want to inconvenience you,” he muttered. It was hard to be entirely comfortable with barging into the other’s home and it felt like too much of a personal contact even though the place was hardly lived-in.

“Then don’t,” the courier winked at him on the exit.

It was clear enough that he did not give a damn about any personal contact by a fraction so Arcade simply let out a relieved sigh and stopped troubling himself any further. On the bright side, the Followers’ facility did not have a bathroom, irradiated or not, and the motel bed seemed so large it could have easily accommodated several Brahmins, let alone a single adult.

Eddie got stuck at the doorway. H caught the eyebot by one of the antennas and directed it outside before locking the door behind them. He handed the key over and started explaining something but Arcade quickly lost the track of his words. He looked up from the stairs and spotted the most heartwarmingly familiar face above the railing on the second floor.

The face beamed at his sight. Daisy waved at him gleefully while the courier was not looking, pointed at the settling sun and mouthed something but Arcade did not get the meaning. He tried to hold back a silly smile but the effort met with a spectacular failure so he at least limited his gesticulation to a covert thumbs-up. She must have been living right there, in Novac, otherwise why would she be at the motel?..

The last time they exchanged letters was about a month ago. She wrote that she had come across a rocket-launching facility and had been toying with mechanisms she had scavenged. It must have been nearby, or she had moved again since. The family were always the ones to send letters, except for Henry. Henry stayed put so it was easy to reach him whenever Arcade wanted to give an update even though the old man also was the slowest to reply.

It did not matter whether Daisy stayed at the motel. Arcade was so glad to see her, even from some distance for the time being, that he immediately started riling himself up again. He only realized that he had been unconsciously following the courier around when he almost bumped into the man’s back at someone’s residence entrance. H glanced over his shoulder but Arcade had already managed to thoroughly erase the half-witted smile from his face by then.

“Sorry, stumbled a bit. Do your delivery thing,” he said and stayed outside.

The courier only stopped by two other houses before he decided to head down the road leading from Novac back into the wasteland. “There’s a scrapyard that way, managed by a lovely lady and her doggies,” H clarified and then gave Arcade a squinted look. “You okay with dogs, right?”

He nodded. Dogs were alright: funny and loyal. Arcade was good with dogs. He struggled to think of anything except sneaking out later in the evening to meet with Daisy; it was childish, however, and to top it off rather foolish: the more he thought about it the more his stupid face would give away. He cleared his throat awkwardly and turned to H but they were already at the fence entrance and the man did not look at him.

The lady who managed the scrapyard was about Daisy’s age. She greeted them with a smile from atop her makeshift chair next to a largely dented garage door, took the last letter from the courier’s hands and gave a loud whistle.

“Here they come!” The warning was a bit belated: a whole pack of joyfully barking dogs rushed through the scrapyard gates chasing each other. H dropped his rifle, crouched before the yapping dogs with a laugh and let them sniff at his face while he was scratching their furry sides energetically.

One of the dogs got more interested in Arcade; it looked older than the others and slightly graying at the snout. It nuzzled at the back of his palm ticklingly and tilted its head when he petted it between the ears.

“Rey likes you. Don’t worry, he’s not a biter.” The lady let out an encouraging smile and turned to Eddie idly floating above them. “Now what’s that, a bent plate?.. Go get the pliers from the shack, mister, let’s fix this mess before someone sees it. I'm pretty sure I left those in a toolbox somewhere… I'll check inside.”

She left. The dog, Rey, was still looking up at Arcade and wagging its tail so he petted it a bit more. H left the others alone and grabbed his rifle from the ground before heading through the open gates of the scrapyard, followed by three of the dogs and the beeping eyebot. They were gone for quite some time. Arcade sat down on the pile of car tires and studied the pale pink clouds on the horizon.

It was quiet for a while. Then a loud clatter broke the silence as though instead of bringing back the pliers the courier brought down a tool rack. The dogs at the scrapyard started barking violently. Arcade leaped to his feet and ran into the labyrinth of destroyed vehicles and tires without thinking, the Defender already unholstered and ready to empty the whole energy cell at any hostile.

Turned out there were no hostiles. “… some information that we could use,” Eddie broadcasted throughout the whole scrapyard. “Oh wait, where are my manners? This is Lorenzo, a Knight with the Brotherhood of Steel.”

“Leave my robot alone, Loren-whatever!” H snarled and knocked on the eyebot.

“… your tech. Could you bring the robot to one of our patrols so they can examine it?” the broadcast continued. It was loud and clear; the Enclave technology worked like a charm even when the Enclave itself did not.

The courier knocked on the front plate harder. “I don’t think so!” he snapped.

“I’ll have the robot mark the location on your map,” Lorenzo the Knight stated. The eyebots were not supposed to be equipped with mics so he could not hear the response but Arcade doubted that the man would listen anyway. The Brotherhood of Steel had never been renowned for their abundance of attentiveness.

“What the-… the hell you won’t!” H gasped. “How did you even-… Is he gone? Eddie?”

He grabbed the beeping eyebot by the sides and turned it around to check for… something. Arcade holstered the Defender and crossed his arms nervously. Enclave technology was bad enough. The Brotherhood?.. Try ‘horrific’.

“Hey, you alright?” he asked.

H turned to him, he looked confused and very sad. “I don’t know. I didn’t… I mean, I didn’t think it was possible to hack into Eddie, from… just from somewhere? Like that? Is there a terminal for him? No, can’t be, or they wouldn’t need his info… a lab? He’s military tech, that’s dead on, and that info he stores? It must be something to do with the military.”

Arcade clenched his teeth and exhaled slowly. “It is unsafe to have this thing around,” he said. “And by ‘unsafe’ I mean mortal danger.”

“No.” The courier obstinately shook his head. “I found him, I fixed his bucket and I can fix what’s inside. I just need to find a science guy.”

“The Brotherhood are not going to just forget about it, are they? You are not very hard to notice with it floating around you all over Nevada. They will find you,” Arcade insisted. “What I am trying to say is... supposing that it were to ‘fall’ into Lake Mead and be irreparably damaged... and that you threw an EMP grenade in after it just in case…”

H started gnawing his lip and reached out a hand to touch the eyebot’s side lightly. “No. They can’t have him. I wouldn’t give him up just because some… some siblinghood crook, whatever, wanted him.” He looked around and picked large pliers up from the ground. Arcade watched him straighten the edge of Eddie’s side panel back in place.

“The Brotherhood are dangerous people,” he said. H did not reply. He collected the tools scattered around him back into the box along with the pliers and squeezed it into an empty space on the nearby rack.

Arcade let out a huff. It was already dark and he was starting to feel tired, more mentally than physically despite the long walk from the city. And frankly speaking he did not care enough about either the eyebot or its way too stubborn owner. The light from H’s Pip-boy illuminated only a tiny part of the scrapyard and it did not feel wise to stay outside at nightfall, let alone hunted by the Brotherhood.

“Let’s go.” The courier sighed. “I’ll tell Mrs. Gibson that we’ll be leaving. You wanna eat?.. I’ve… I've something to tell you since you kinda had to find out all that stuff about Eddie. You’re smart, maybe you’ll figure out more than I did.”

They reached Novac in silence. The dogs were running after them at first but then returned back to the scrapyard. There was a bunch of locals hanging about next to a barrel campfire in the center of the settlement. Arcade noticed that ‘No vacancies’ neon sign near the motel entrance was working but only the first five letters appeared lit up. Nifty.

The campfire served as a grill. There was a kitchen in a tent close by but both the stove and the fridge were defunct, thankfully as opposed to the hot plates. H grabbed a knife and pried open a can of Pork n’ Beans they had purchased from the lady at the scrapyard. He scoured the drawers for something to use as dishes and fished out a small bowl and a handleless mug. There was even a couple of utensils lying about on the makeshift counter.

“There are audio logs in him,” the courier started when they sat down on one of the rocket models underneath the metal canopy of the ransacked Poseidon station. “I don’t know how to play them again but I made notes. I've only heard two so far - they activate, well, they activate with commands I don’t know. Some word or the other, can be anything. Both times it happened when I was talking to someone and then - wham! - Eddie starts broadcasting that researcher guy.”

Arcade hummed in response and took a spoonful of beans from his bowl. By that moment he had already decided that if the Brotherhood showed up he would just run in the opposite direction and made peace with that decision. He gave all the warnings he could, after all. The same applied to the eyebot if one of its Enclave search and destroy protocols ever initiated.

“I figured that the logs were real old if not Pre-War ‘cause Eddie was supposed to go to some outpost when repaired. Guess he’s broken or something ‘cause he stayed,” H said, scraping the sides of the mug for leftovers with a trident fork. “Plus, I wasn’t sure about all this military stuff until I saw the one in the museum today. They mentioned some places but those aren’t on my map and I don’t know of any army around other than the NCR. He doesn’t look that ancient but he may be just upgraded.”

“There are plenty of mechanics in New Vegas.” Arcade shrugged. “And scientists like that Brotherhood Knight who sent you a message.”

“Yeah… that’s what I thought,” the courier muttered and turned the Pip-boy screen on; its light faded momentarily. “Here, let’s see… Okay, so I didn’t get the guy’s name but he mentioned ‘Adams force base’, that’s where he was. And that he was working on ‘duraframe’ combat eyebots, yeah, now we know it’s eyebots… Eddie is the only prototype ‘cause they cancelled the whole thing for some fire armor… War, duh...”

It was fascinating how H’s mind worked. The courier was far from silly and in spite of his lack of knowledge regarding any of the subjects at hand he managed to draw conclusions that were unsettlingly close to reality. Even more unsettling was the fact that his eyebot was definitely an Enclave project presumably stuffed with intel on how to start mass production of its brethren. If Arcade was not mistaken, and he was likely not, Adams base must have been situated on the farther coastline, over two thousand miles to the east.

It meant that so-called Eddie, firstly, lived up to its model name, and secondly was even more dangerous than Arcade had assumed.

“What else is there?” he asked.

H was still staring at the screen. “Eddie was going to a ‘Nevarro’ and I think he was supposed to pass through Chicago. It’s real far from here though… but it was easier to cross the country before the bombs dropped, right? Ah, and that guy, he mentioned some enclave, an enclave outpost. I asked around and they said it was something like a kind of a closed society. Presumably in Pre-War Chicago. Like, a solid maybe.”

Arcade took a fresh look at the man beside him and studied his taut face for a moment. Then he hummed musingly and looked down at his hands still toying with the empty bowl. He could not quite grasp what he felt about all that. It would probably be much safer both for him and the family to know as much as possible about the eyebot and H’s search for answers regarding it… either that or two shots in the heads. One in the courier’s, one in the doctor’s. The Enclave technology did work like a charm after all, and Eddie proved to be a fine example of that. Its energy cannon was no different. 

“Navarro,” Arcade said after a pause. “It’s a place on the western coast, in California. It has been deserted for quite some time. Alright, give me a moment to process all this.”

“I just wanna make sure no one can hack into him again,” H admitted sadly. “I don’t give a damn about all that War junk but like, if there isn’t anyone waiting for him then he’s mine. I’d delete the info but I don’t know how… at least yet, so… plus, like you said, those brothers guys must be dangerous. Can’t risk wandering about asking dumb questions.”

“You can always go back to plan A.”

“What’s plan A?” H asked perplexedly.

“Lake Mead and an EMP,” Arcade whispered as if he was trying to conceal the plan from the eyebot.

H snorted and nudged him jokingly. “Calculated violence doesn’t suit you much, doctor.”

Arcade swallowed hard. Yeah, cum grano salis… He shook his head and gestured at the water pump nearby. They put the washed dishes back in the cabinet and walked past the motel entrance. H hemmed awkwardly and rubbed the back of his neck.

“Alright, you got the key. Feel free to use anything you find, I don’t mind. And, eh, Rad-X, medkit. Unless you wanna grow some extras,” he reminded and waved goodbye on his way to the door at the dinosaur bottom. “Come on, Eddie.”

“Thanks,” Arcade echoed.

The motel was silent and there were no people around so he walked past the room along the open hallway on the second floor and knocked on the last door in the row. He belatedly wondered if the last room was actually Daisy’s or she was just standing next to it when he saw her. But it was already too late for second thoughts and Daisy did not make him wait at the threshold.

She opened the door and peeked outside before warmly beckoning him to enter.

“Oh, look at you, what a stunning gentleman,” Daisy marvelled with a smile. “Just like your father but such a sourpuss. What’s up with the dreary face?”

“I missed you.” Arcade sighed. “Sorry I couldn’t slip away earlier.”

She chuckled fondly and folded him in her arms; he was much taller and her straw cowboy hat was terribly ticklish to the chin.

“Silly boy, you worry too much.” Daisy patted him on the back. “What’s suspicious about visiting a lonely old lady in her home? Especially to that companion of yours, a fine young man, and a rather good-looking one…”

“Think again, that one is constantly onto something,” he muttered grumpily. “And Daisy, we are not... involved. He’s just... I’m just... he’s not even that good-lo...”

“As though you ought to be involved with every handsome lad who bumps into you.” Daisy tittered. “He has a little something of ours, doesn’t he? The machine.”

“Don’t worry.” Arcade moved away just enough to see her face. “I’ll make sure no one gets hurt because of it, I promise.”

“No promising what you can’t deliver, sweetheart, who taught you that? Must be Judah’s influence.” Daisy pursed her mouth. “That won’t do.”

“Alright. I’ll keep an eye on them.” He sighed. “Is that better?”

Daisy nodded and settled down on the sofa. “Come now, sit and tell me what’s bothering you. And don’t you even think of running off any time soon.” She shook a finger at him.

Arcade stayed with her till past midnight. Daisy did not show any specific interest in either the Brotherhood of Steel looking for a remnant eyebot or his never-ending internal turmoil regarding how little help he had been offering to the people of Freeside. Instead, she asked about his research, the Followers and their old fort, his travels with H and the ongoing correspondence with the rest of the family.

She liked it in Novac and considered salvaging and taking apart rocket engines to be a little bit like flying again - at least in comparison to farming and prospecting. Daisy had been grounded for more than thirty years, as long as Arcade could remember and a tad more, but she never left her piloting days behind. It would have been heartbreaking if that did not in every way save her life.

He gave her a hug before leaving and promised to visit again sometime soon. Daisy planted a firm kiss on his forehead, instructed him 'to be a good boy unless someone needed to be shot in the head twice’ and booted him out.

H knocked on his door at sunrise. They left Novac early in the morning and followed the battered highways westward under pale late January sun.


	4. III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I dearly love the Mojave outpost so here we go :)

 

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The Mojave outpost was the last stop one could reach coming from the city along Interstate 15, providing the deathclaws nesting all over the canyons did not pose a problem. In reality, anyone headed to the edge of the NCR territory had to pass through Novac. Arcade would not be one to complain about it.

Back in January they only visited the Mojave outpost briefly to drop off a package and continued to Goodsprings. They reached the town well before sunset and spent a few hours ridding the nearby water source and the surroundings from the overgrown geckos. H sprawled himself on a dirty mattress in someone’s makeshift camp on a cliff and shot the creatures dead with admirable precision.

Arcade went through the samples that they had collected, threw the ones he was uninterested in away and passed the rest of the time dozing in Eddie’s weirdly shaped shadow to the steady sound of suppressed rifle shots. A tough-looking ginger town girl and her guard dog gathered the gecko carcasses all over the open plain. H did not speak much with the locals but they acted as if they had known him for a while, or rather as if he somehow remained a part of their community despite spending most of the time away.

The second time the Mojave outpost was the final destination of their travels. Arcade stood by his promise and kept an eye on the courier and his rusty Enclave bucket. Doing so required being ready to travel the wasteland alongside them and after a couple of weeks of ever fruitless research work in the Old Mormon Fort he was glad to spend some time on the road.

Much to Arcade’s satisfaction H turned out to be not much of a people person either so the two of them quickly started to get along. They only talked when they wanted, usually at long evening stops, and it  was mostly harmless chitchat. H did not talk of his past as well but he always had funny travel stories to spare. A lot of those verged on unbelievable, however.

They arrived at the outpost around sunset, just ahead the caravans, dropped off a weighty Crimson Caravan package at the barracks and bought a bunch of snacks from the bar. The most surprising thing about the Mojave outpost was that the head ranger in charge of around twenty NCR soldiers still paid H for obliterating the giant ants along I-15. The second most surprising thing was the lack of a food stall. Given the active trade in these parts it would have prospered.

They climbed up the rocks above the traders’ encampment and settled down on the cliff edge. It was probably the best spot in the outpost to observe the plain and the road spread across it towards the eastern horizon. H took his backpack off with an overly expressive sigh and pulled out four carton boxes.

Arcade cast a glance at them while tightening up his boot laces. “Would you rather relish the flavourless potato crisps or hard as bone candied apples?” he asked. “I’m afraid we are going to share the Fancy Lads delight unless you are willing to abstain.”

“No way I’m letting you have all the lads, ‘Cade.” H snorted. “I say we share. Plus, we got two times the crisps…” The courier grabbed two identical packs from the ground and turned them around. “… and none of them with a moon map. Is it even a real thing, I mean, the map, not the moon? Must be some Pre-War joke.”

“Must be.” Arcade shrugged. He tied the last knot on the laces and shook off the dirt from the palms before reaching into his bag for a water bottle. “Here, pour it on my hands. Please.”

H did as he was told and then stretched his own hands forward. “You do realize it doesn’t make them clean, right?” he wondered.

“The point is to make them cleaner.”

Arcade had to admit he was exaggerating the flavourlessness of the potato crisps as those were still a little bit salty. He looked down at the outpost. The caravans they had passed by on their way finally reached the outpost and were unpacking for the night under the strict guidance of an NCR sergeant.

They were too far away to watch closely, however. He finished the crisps and carefully turned the pack upside down above his palm to get the crumbs before tearing the box at the seams to arrange the apples onto it.

H simply gaped his mouth open, poured the crumbs right into it and laughed when Arcade arched a brow at him. The crumbs were, obviously, all over.

“Wow.”

“Yeah, piss off.” The courier grinned.

Eventually, he took off his cap and tied his huffled hair into an untidy knot on the nape. It always showed through in the sun that he was actually blond - a much darker, goldish color of sundried roadside weeds all over the Mojave. The texture, thanks to the lack of care, was quite similar. Arcade silently studied the chaotic pattern of stitches midst the still regrowing mess on his temple.

The candied apples were more sour than sweet and stuck dreadfully to the teeth. The sourness generally varied from package to package but the stickiness remained constant. He winced at the taste and made an attempt to wash it down with the rest of the water.

H burst the upper side of the cupcakes pack open and offered the box to Arcade. “Fancy a Fancy Lad, doctor?” he teased, barely holding back a smirk. The cakes were a bit flattened and decorated with crushed powder-white icing but they did still look quite delicious, no wonder they were so hard to come by those days.

“You are terrible at puns.” Arcade chuckled and reached out a hand but the pack was swiftly pulled from under his grasp. “Hey, give it back.”

“First you take that back, duh.” The courier prudently held the box away. “Can’t be bad at puns, puns are for fun times. Plus, you’re smiling.”

“Vero nihil verius. And I am not smiling, I am expertly conveying mockery of your failed effort by the means of a sarcastic sneer.” Arcade held his hand out insistently. “Come on.”

“Nah, I’m pretty sure you think me funny.” H’s grin widened. “That’s why you went with me in the first place. That, and ‘cause I can handle your smartassidness.”

“Is that so? I suppose we have yet to see how you will handle a grave state of…” It was way too easy to trail off and make him genuinely intrigued. The man was an open book albeit half of it was in Latin.

“Of what?” The courier narrowed his eyes suspiciously.

“The way things are going - a grave state of asphyxiation due to choking on a bunch of cupcakes,” Arcade deadpanned and held his hand out again. “Pass over my half, if you please.”

“Evil, huh.” H laughed and thrust the box into his hands.

The scenery was slowly growing purple after sundown and the waxing gibbous was creeping up the darkening skydome. It coloured the wasteland in much more pleasant colors than the sun and made the grim state of things less evident. Even the huge statue of two men shaking hands that was looming over the outpost looked more solid due to shadows concealing the welds between its metal sheets.

“Do you know what’s the story behind these two?” Arcade inquired after the cupcakes were finished. “Did the NCR build them? They look recent.”

H looked up from thoroughly picking at the crumbs in the emptied box and turned his gaze to the statue. “The Rangers?.. Yeah, they’re from about ten years ago. A monument to the unification treaty between Nevada Desert Rangers and the NCR fellas. The rangers had been here since before the War, real survivalists. They signed the treaty in exchange for help in protecting the Dam so they’re a part of the NCR now, mixed with the vets.”

Arcade hummed amazedly. “You sound… admiring,” he said.

“That’s ’cause I am.” The courier smiled. “I like the stories. The Desert Rangers… they were typical good guys. Saving people, hunting outlaws. Just like those cowboys from the songs on the radio minus the horses and the ladies, y'know? The vets are all elsewhere, or I bet we’d have overthrown the Legion already. And the statue looks grand, so large you can see it from far down Long 15.”

It was true. The statue stood high above the wasteland and as long as the rocky ridges or constant sandstorms did not conceal it from one’s view it was visible from far ahead. Arcade gave it a closer look.

“The one in the coat looks more weather-beaten,” he said. The other figure was barely visible from behind the first one’s shoulder from their place atop the cliff but its metal sheets looked much lighter in color.

“He’s wearing the black armor, the Desert Ranger armor.” H made effort to emphasize ‘the’ a lot. ”Legendary and super rare nowadays. The other one’s got shades to match though.”

Arcade threw a sceptical look at him. “You cannot really think that an NCR sculptor while creating a huge monument to commemorate a military amalgamation event took time to give one of them shades.”

“Here, let’s zoom in.” The courier hastily licked the remaining icing from his fingers and grabbed the rifle from the ground. He routinely propped it on his shoulder and looked through the scope. “Pretty sure those are shades.”

“Let me see,” Arcade said and leaned in. H stretched out his arms and held the rifle still for him.

It took some adaptation. The two large projectors illuminating the statue after dark were already on but neither of them shed light onto the farther ranger’s metal face. Arcade huffed and took the rifle from its owner’s unresisting hands. It was large, much larger than it seemed while H was holding it, and terribly heavy.

“Oh my… how do you even use this… piece of artillery… Wait, I think I got it. I am not going to accidentally shoot somebody, am I?” The question came out a bit belated.

“It’s on safety.” H chuckled. “Wanna learn? How to hold it right?”

Arcade shrugged, and the rifle’s recoil pad roughly poked him in the shoulder. “Honestly? I doubt that I am ever going to hold this thing again, but why not?.. There are worse things to learn in one’s lifetime.”

H got on his feet and crouched behind him. Barely touching, he adjusted Arcade’s grip in two firm motions and forced his elbows up. “Normally a weapon as large as Snipey would be resting on the ground or some prop, see, there’s a special pod for that? You gotta support her. What’s funny? Yah, I saw you fire that plasma pistol of yours, these arms aren’t as weak as you’re trying to show here. Hold her.”

Arcade snorted but did as he was told and tilted his head to the scope. Then he moved a bit farther and finally got the clear visual of the statue. The metal bastard was totally wearing shades, there were two smaller metal sheets welded into the mess right where the glasses would have been.

“Told ya.” H smirked and willingly took the rifle back when Arcade offloaded it into his arms with a grunt. “These two are local icons.”

Soon they put the empty packs one into another and climbed back down. It was still too cold to stay outside for the night in the middle of February, even the caravaneers were leaving a single guard in the pens to look after the Brahmins. Arcade was lucky that his company, the only courier restless enough to bring post to the farthest outpost in the Mojave, was in the head ranger’s good graces.

They got a bunk in the far corner of the usually half-empty outpost barracks; the only thing those lacked was a shower but there at least was tap water in the sink in the main building and a decent filter. When Arcade returned, the bar was already closed and some of the bunks were occupied. H was still tinkering with the eyebot in an attempt to muffle its beeping with a couple of sponges and some duct tape. The tape turned out to be his ultimate solution for everything a joke and a .308 in the head could not solve.

Unlike the last time, he moved away from the climbing frame and let Arcade settle in on the upper bunk. “Hope I don’t wake you up again,” the courier spoke in hushed tones. There was some stirring, a barely softened smack of the backpack atop the mattress and an unintelligible swear. “There… Gonna be on the roof but I’ll leave Eddie just outside, okay?”

“Alright.” Arcade folded his dirty coat into a more or less comfortable pillow, carefully took his glasses off and placed them atop the bag in the corner. “Carpe noctem and all that.”

H gripped the bunk frame, pulled himself up and peered over it curiously. “Why do you always slip that Latin stuff in?..” his blurry silhouette whispered in the dark.

Arcade grinned and shooed him away with a lazy wave of a hand. “Omnia dicta fortiora si dicta Latina.”

The courier tittered. “Well, goodnight to you too, I guess. Doctor smartass.”

“That’s right.” Arcade rolled over to the side and pulled the thick NCR army blanket up until it threatened to leave his feet open.

He did not hear the rest of the soldiers come in and did not wake up when H returned. The man could have just as well deprived himself from sleep completely but he did lie down from time to time, usually for a few hours or so, mostly late at night but sometimes he started falling off his feet in broad daylight.

Everyone was stressed in the wasteland. As much as Arcade would like to help, it wasn’t a problem that a roll of duct tape could fix.


	5. IV

 

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They made another short trip to the south in March. H turned up at the old fort entrance at dawn with his usual grin and a pair of giant rat shish-kebabs and lured Arcade away under a promise to get him some recently ghoulified specimens for the research. The research in question was actively progressing only in regard to the list of futile efforts in studying various samples that bore no fruit. Arcade decided that it was useful to get distracted before going back to the routine. Besides, recently mutated ghouls were rare and the ways in which human bodies adapted to excessive radiation were genuinely fascinating.

It turned out later that the ghouls used to be a part of the NCR until a Legion attack on their base resulted in a massive disaster and a wave of immediate brain deaths and subsequent horrifying mutations. The area had been highly irradiated ever since but H assured that they would not be trespassing any further than the NCR patrols. They were ultimately to hunt down the ghouls missed by the soldiers in the surrounding area and bring back a bunch of dog tags for the record.

They passed through Novac but only for a short rest so when the unsettling green cloud appeared on the horizon it was still too bright to fully apprehend its thickness. From the looks of it, Camp Searchlight used to be a large outpost, a major obstacle on the way of the Legion’s operations from Cottonwood Cove. After the accident it became a town-sized radioactive cesspit.

The NCR encampment on the edge of the irradiated zone was miserable; they hardly had enough people to protect themselves from whatever menace drew near and they were stationed near Searchlight mostly to prevent travellers from approaching the site. The Legion had not been interested in the settlement since it destruction and the ghouls that wandered into the wasteland never came back.

The sergeant who greeted them looked swell for the sole survivor of the disaster and insisted that he only wished for peace and justice for his fallen comrades-in-arms. H promised the soldier to talk to some major about his request and they finally headed into the hills safe from radiation from the edge of the cloud.

“Since when are you working with the NCR?” Arcade asked as soon as they were out of the sergeant’s earshot. “Or are you deceiving them?”

H glanced up from loading a new round into his gun. “Not working but I know the major, did a bunch of deliveries for him in Forlorn Hope.” He shoved a handful of ammo into his baggy jacket pockets and folded the empty box. “It’s the front line now, can’t be sure he’s gonna send a team to the Cove but I figured either him or no one.”

“I see,” Arcade mused.

“I know your band aren’t best buddies with the NCR but they also got good people so I won’t deny them help, that’s all. Don’t worry, I’m not enlisting or something.” H smiled.

Everyone would have indisputably been better off trying to help the people of New Vegas but as long as the Legion’s threat was looming large on the horizon it was no one’s priority but the Followers’. Arcade had not been the most helpful of them anyway.

He shrugged uncomfortably and unholstered the Defender. “I did not come along to tell you what to do. Let’s go hunt some ghouls.”

It did not take much time to run into a pack of ferals but it took a surprising amount of ammo to put them down. All the ghouls were fast, the recent ones - twice as fast, thrice as aggressive and to top it off clad in well maintained NCR armor. H’s .44 dealt them little damage unless successfully crippling the legs; the initial headshot barely dented the feral’s helmet.

One of the ghouls managed to get through the barrage of plasma fire while Arcade was reloading and leaped forward faster than Eddie could zap it with a focused energy blast.

“Oh shi-!..” H gasped and shot twice. The first one missed but the second one fractured the feral’s kneecap. It collapsed to the ground and ran towards them on all threes in twitchy uneven jumps.

Arcade fired the whole energy cell into the thing’s vertebral column until it finally hit the ground and stopped moving. He reloaded in complete silence and raised a slightly trembling hand to push the sliding glasses up the bridge of his nose.

Eddie’s sensors were dead so he relaxed by a fracture and let out a nervous sigh.

“Good shots.” H crouched next to the other ghoul and reached for its neck to take the dog tag. He had to flip it over and breathed out a feeble ‘ew’ at the mess.

The ferals had never been a sight for a sore eye but Arcade also had never seen the process of ghoulification up close. The ghoul’s muscles were hardened and the loosened skin on its face was ready to start peeling off. The nose was still present but it must have been torn off during the fall and was dangling on a large shred of skin.

Arcade leaned closer to have a better look at the exposed muscles and involuntarily echoed H’s ‘ew’.

“You know what, I’m thinking maybe we better take position and just bang them headless from there… Pretty sure Snipey can pop these open with their pots on,” the courier suggested. “I mean, that one almost got us… Plus, damn, they fugly.”

“I need to take some samples first,” Arcade stated and they exchanged disgusted pained looks. “I understand you would rather not be around for that, just don’t go too far.”

He opened his yet vacant specimens sack and took out several empty metal containers packed in a sealed zipper bag. The containers were supposedly strong enough to keep the radiation from mutated parts from creeping out and poisoning both the researcher and the assistant. H watched him put on the loose medical gloves sterilized so many times they almost lost shape and ready the scalpel. Then he mumbled something about finding a good position and wandered off.

The hardest part was not to get messy. Arcade missed the NCR’s laundries all the time but he had to work with the fact that there were few spare Followers’ coats around Nevada and even fewer working washing machines capable of taking out irradiated ghoul blood.

He covered his face, spent a moment on a minor breakdown regarding his life choices and carefully dissected three of the ghouls one after another: the noseless one, the one that almost bit off H’s head and the one that looked a little more pale and turned out to be slightly glowing on the inside. He heard several gunshots while lastly extracting the glowing one’s blood from its insides with a needleless syringe but since no screams followed he chose to ignore the noise.

H came back, safe and sound as predicted, when Arcade was almost done packing the test tubes. He watched the contents cautiously for a moment but hoped that the irradiated body fluids, tissues and alvus he collected would be securely contained inside. Although even if something happened, the samples’ level of emitted radiation would probably be too low to be considered threatening.

The courier waited for him to finish, silently fished a bottle of dirty water from the exterior holder on his backpack and helped wash the blood off the filthy gloves.

“Thanks. Any luck hunting?” Arcade shook off the excess water and pulled off the gloves to pack them into one of the containers.

“Yeah, gotta go look for them now… South-ish.” H shrugged. “Wanna check out the barns as well, Eddie’s sensors go wild at them. Must be inhabited but who knows.”

Arcade got up and stretched his knees with a groan. “Okay. What do we do with these?.. We cannot leave them lying about.” He waved at the corpses.

H looked down at them in confusion. “Can’t burn, toxic. Well, err, the sergeant gave me a signal fire but like, these were his friends, right?.. Won’t be happy we delved into them.” He took the signal pistol out of his pocket and showed it to Arcade. “I say we signal.”

Arcade nodded. “Let them dig.”

They fired the signal and made a hasty retreat to the south in the direction of large wooden barns. The barns were inhabited, albeit only by a herd of malnourished bighorners and Brahmins. The gates were open; half the herd was idling about in the pens outside. There were no living quarters around apart from a burned down ruin across from the barns. The fire did not look very recent.

“Strange. These don’t look wild,” H voiced his concern and entered the closest barn. There were several Brahmin calves inside, they noticed the visitors and came closer. “Yeah, totally domesticated. What’s up, babies?.. Damn, you look spiny... “

He reached out both hands and fondly petted the most curious calf on both necks. “Who's the best two-headed cudster in the wasteland?.. Let’s figure out what happened to you, okay? And… uh, and get you some food, real soon.”

Arcade decided to look around and took the stairs to the upper floor but it was almost empty except for some magazine in the corner and a torn piece of paper atop the wooden trunk near the stairs. He picked up both but the page turned out to be too small to fit in.

“What you got there?” H asked as he descended down the stairs. Arcade gave him the magazine and tried to decipher the awful handwriting in the note. “The Wasteland Survival Guide, sounds cool. Published by M. Brown in seventy seven… promisingly recent. What’s up with the note?”

“It is a page from a diary, a child’s one I think.” Arcade sighed. “Looks like the farmers who lived here turned into ghouls and he, or she, had to kill them. End of page.”

H took the note from his hands and skimmed through it. “Wow.. that’s… that’s very sad. They can still be around, right? Let’s go search around. Must've went down when the camp got all radioactive. Damn.”

They spent half an hour walking around the abandoned farm and finally found the burned remains in the house.

“Damn,” H said again and sighed. “Something must've happened... “

“We cannot know for sure, I’m afraid.” Arcade looked around the scene but all the furniture burned down along with the house except for the bath and a fridge half-buried in the ash and dirt. “It’s past noon already, we need to hurry if we are not planning on spending the night outside.”

“Maybe the soldiers know.” The courier pushed his vizor up as usual and rubbed the red stripe on his forehead with a hum.

They walked past the starving cattle and pressed south. There was a pair of ferals lazily wandering about in the hills but the encounter was over much faster by joint effort. H collected the ghouls’ dog tags and climbed up the nearest rock to look for the ones he shot earlier.

“Something large there.” He pointed down the hill. “A wreckage.”

“And the ghouls?” Arcade asked tiredly. His legs started hurting each time he thought about the two-hour road back to Novac. Strolling along the battered Highway 95 was fine but hiking in the hills proved to be rather exhausting.

H turned around studying the unvaried sundried scenery. “There! Among the rocks. Almost missed them.” He jumped down and hurried to grab his trophies.

They decided to check the wreckage in case it was recent and see if any ferals were attracted to it. The only air force ever seen around the Mojave belonged to the NCR now and came all the way from California but given the state of the camp nearby anything could have happened. They reached the edge of the large furrow and peered over the edge.

There was a crashed aircraft half buried in the ground. The crash site looked very old but surprisingly no one had scrapped the wreckage for parts.

“A vertibird. Interesting,” Arcade wondered. “It’s been a long time since I saw one of these.”

The thing was probably Enclave. The serial number on the tail was too flaked to discern from the distance but it certainly was not NCR.

H stared at the vertibird with genuine fascination. “When was that?” he asked. “Last time, I mean?”

Arcade bit his tongue hastily and tried to think of a plausible lie that would not immediately trigger more awkward questions and befitting answers. “Huh, good question. Must have been in a book.”

“Cool. What kind of book?”

“A book with pictures,” he responded flatly and started climbing down the edge of the furrow.

They reached the bottom in silence and investigated the crash site. The vertibird was indeed Enclave, supposedly from Navarro, and the wreckage was most likely the same age as Arcade. The untouched exterior rusted through although the craft was scavenged on the inside and there were two skeletons on the ground next to it, probably pulled out of the cockpit.

Arcade looked inside. The hidden compartment at the back was untouched but he did not dare check it to attract even more attention to his stupid comment. He reached out a hand and patted the rusted fuselage. “The Brotherhood of Steel uses these, by the way.”

H threw back his head to look at the rotor. “This one looks… advanced. And they managed to hack into Eddie using whatever tech. Are they from a Vault or something?”

“They operate from bunkers.” Arcade nodded. They left the crash site and slowly headed back to the NCR encampment. “As far as I know, they were a small group from the US army before the War. They locked themselves up in a military bunker when the bombs fell and had survived ever since using the technology that was stored there and whatever resources they possessed. They had resurfaced some time before the war started... about forty or fifty years ago, perhaps? They are still battling the NCR back in California.”

“Isn’t war hard with two front lines?” H huffed sceptically. “I mean, they’ve been at war with the Legion for years now. How large is the NCR?”

“Well, it is… rather sizeable. However despite all the technology and weaponry at their disposal they were still at a disadvantage compared to the Brotherhood’s hardened power armor and advanced cybernetics. They almost lost the war in the beginning.” Arcade must have barely been able to count on his fingers at that time. He did not recall the dates exactly but he was positive it happened well before he got to read his first picture book from cover to cover.

“Power armor is a kind of robot costume, right?”

Arcade trailed off and let out an approving chuckle. “Yes, it is… exactly that, actually. A bulky frame with armored metal plates on top, a kind of an exoskeleton powered by hydraulic systems. It is military tech from before the War. It basically makes the wearer strong and provides great damage resistance from most types of weapons.”

“I can see how that’s a problem.” H gave a whistle. “Wait, that was years ago. Doesn’t the NCR have those now?”

“They do but not because they are able to produce or even upgrade them. Same goes for the Brotherhood, they use whatever they possess and that’s it. In anticipation of your question regarding why there aren’t any power-armored soldiers stamping around Nevada - I don’t know. They are probably engaged somewhere else. The NCR must think that their manpower in the region is enough to guarantee a win over the Legion,” Arcade said with little certainty. “There ought to be some political reasoning behind it that I am unaware of.”

H stopped to take out two water bottles from the backpack and passed one over. “No way any reasoning is gonna defend the Dam. Or defeat the Legion. Or help the people of New Vegas in any way. Unlike that power armor.” He frowned at the irradiated cloud above the ruins of Camp Searchlight.

Arcade twisted the bottle cap off and followed his gaze. “You are right, of course. However the numbers have always been the NCR’s advantage in every war. There are people to draw the troops from in the Republic and people to send to the front lines - a resource that, unlike the Legion, the Brotherhood does not possess. As I said, they operate from bunkers. They are a secluded society and do not accept new members from the outside.”

H let out a soft laugh. “So you’re saying there’s an enclave in California.”

“You do like that story a lot, don’t you?” Arcade barely stifled a snort. “Yes, there is. They are not the only… enclave over there but they are the only paramilitary organization left that I am aware of. As well as pseudo-religious, so, please, if they do ever find you and Eddie - do as they say. You cannot reason with them, they are fanatics. Follow orders and run as fast as you can as soon as they turn around. Okay?”

“Okay.” H nodded and from the looks of it he took the advice to heart.

They reached the encampment without further incidents and handed over a bundle of ghoul dog tags. Arcade noticed that it was much larger than the amount that they collected. Some of those were stored in a sealed zipper bag just like the ones he was using for storage. He gave H a reasonably suspicious look.

The sergeant who spoke to them let out a relieved sigh. “Thank you. Every tag you bring me is one more soldier at peace.”

“You’re welcome. Caution, they’re a bit glowy.” The courier crumpled his backpack straps awkwardly and glanced at Arcade somewhat guiltily. “Err, and we’re sorry for, eh, rummaging in your friends. There’s several more to the southeast in the hills, next to a crashed v… crashed what-bird?..”

“A vertibird,” Arcade prompted. “They fly up and down.”

The sergeant shrugged. “Those boys aren't themselves anymore, they deserved a clean death. What happens to the corpses doesn’t matter.” He took out a small sack of caps and started counting them on the nearby picnic table. “Twenty five each.”

The price was hardly fair considering how hard the ghouls would have been to kill by anything short of a sniper rifle and a latest model Plasma Defender but the sergeant must have used his own money to hire them. It scarcely gave off an impression of an official NCR mission backed by the army command.

H sat down on one of the table benches and watched the sergeant put the caps back in the sack. “Yeah… and, Sarge, there’s another survivor, called Edwards. You know him? He doesn’t wanna leave the house, says he got nowhere to go ‘cause he turned. But he’s not feral. I said I’d tell you.”

“If he's a ghoul he should be put down.” The sack swiftly changed hands. “I can't let a rabid dog suffer.”

Arcade stared at him in disbelief, H also looked taken aback at the answer. He shook his head scowlingly and his frown deepened. “No way. The hell is wrong with you, Sarge? I saw ghouls serving in the NCR, why murder? Those rangers at Station Echo are ghouls, must be more… He’s not dangerous or anything.”

The sergeant studied them for a moment. The encampment was quiet except for Eddie’s constant beeping. “Murder, you say... He talked to you?” he asked doubtfully.

“Well, duh. Spoke like you and I here.” H huffed. “Ghouls aren’t monsters, yeah. Ferals are another thing. Can’t mix them up.”

“To be honest I haven’t seen any non-hostile ghouls around here.” The sergeant looked at the ruins of Camp Searchlight through the thin greenish fog reaching the encampment. “I’d rather not take the chance. Ferals are tough to kill and we don’t have enough people to keep constant watch on one of our own. Look, I don’t want to murder anyone, okay? Enough people died. Send him to Echo if you say there are ghouls. They should know more.”

“Most certainly. By the way, we came across an abandoned farm to the east,” Arcade pointed out. “The farmers are dead but there is a passel of fine cattle left. The NCR are not planning on taking them in, are they?”

“We can’t,” the sergeant replied. “I sent a word to the command after the fire but Camp McCarran is a long way from here, we would need an experienced herder or a pack of trained dogs.”

“I know where to get both,” H edged in. “So what, can we have them? Just like that?”

“Yeah. They aren’t mine to sell anyway so good luck. We’ll go on patrol soon. Thank you again for bringing the tags. Much appreciated.” The sergeant stretched out a hand to offer them both a handshake.

H returned it with a satisfied hem and dropped his backpack on the ground. The rifle followed with much more attentiveness. “Okay. Pity all those rad suits were stolen… Used up both RadAways you gave me yesterday.” He turned to Arcade as soon as the sergeant left and let out a guilty smile. “Sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“I am in no position to judge but strolling into a highly irradiated zone that actual soldiers do not approach under penalty of death and horrible mutation may be unwise. Especially alone and with no appropriate medication at hand.” Arcade pursed his lips disapprovingly and reached into his bag for a couple of Rad-X pills. “Take these. I only have one RadAway on me so try to come back before your nose falls off.”

“Thanks, ‘Cade. I’ll be in and out in no time.” H swallowed the pill, hid another in his right mitt and darted off into the radioactive cloud accompanied by the beeping eyebot.

Arcade propped the abandoned rifle on the picnic table and watched them through the scope until they disappeared from view behind the buildings. They were gone for about half an hour so he did not have time to tire of rearranging modest contents of his bag. There was no need to take a change of clothes or a shaving stick on a two days tour so he only brought along the medication from his personal stock. They rarely got into much trouble on their journeys but Arcade had always preferred to stay on the safe side.

H trotted back and shouldered his backpack before reaching for the rifle on the table. He did not look ill - no more than his usual forworn appearance anyway - and displayed a rather content grin. “Got him to go to Echo… make a detour from here, just in case.”

The days grew longer since the the oncoming of spring but the sun was slowly starting to settle down. They left the encampment behind and headed back to Novac for the night along the familiar battered paving of Highway 95.

They did not speak except for a comment or two regarding a full pack of fresh meat jerky H fished out of his backpack. An odd old couple sold it in Novac and it was absolutely delicious, especially in comparison to all the Pre-War snacks that were relatively popular all over the wasteland.

“I get it why you decided it was best to keep from my attention that you’ve unadvisedly exposed yourself to an unsafe amount of radiation and two RadAway IVs in a row. But why would you come all they way to the city for me?” Arcade asked casually when they shared the jerky pack in half. “You were doing fine without my help.”

“I can’t - advisedly and safely - pack ghouls for you, can I?” H shrugged and gnawed at the rubbery piece of meat. “Got the idea while bashing a glowy one’s brain out.”

Arcade shook his head and made no effort to hide his reassurance. “Fair enough. I’d like my share in meds and help around Freeside, if you please.” He jokingly pointed at the courier with a jerky.

H was not very intimidated. “You got it, doc.” He smiled and looked away.

They reached Novac half an hour after sunset and stayed until early morning. H and his faithful - or rather well-programmed as yet - eyebot habitually accompanied Arcade on the way back to the old fort and stuck around for a few days before heading back into the wasteland alone.

Two weeks passed as usual, and then three, and then five. If Arcade did not know any better he would have considered himself concerned, if not worried that something bad could have happened. He made little progress in the research and eventually started helping Julie out with her errands when the Followers’ stock of new specimens to study had been thoroughly exhausted.

He wrote several letters to the family and learned from Daisy that the cattle they had found on the abandoned farm reached Novac unharmed. He did not ask about it but she took her time to mention that she had not seen either the Enclave eyebot or its owner around since their last visit on the way to New Vegas. Arcade even met with Orion in person since the old crock lived nearby and was a bearable company if visited once in several months.

The news travelled fast around the Mojave but neither of it mentioned H in any way.


	6. V/I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The second part of the chapter is gonna be smaller and appear sooner, promise :)

 

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The courier showed up at the gates of the Old Mormon Fort unannounced sometime at the end of the day around mid-April. The orange sunset slopped warm gold all around the skydome and made even the ugly iron latches on the open gates look brassy. Arcade was standing outside his tent with a cup of broc flower and mutfruit tea following Julie’s advice to expose his face to the sun more often ‘before it turned into a deadly laser mercilessly burning his delicate flesh’.

H beamed at Arcade’s sight and strode right up to him as he always did. Up close he looked even more weary than usual but genuinely content.

“Aere perennius, are you?” Arcade chuckled and shook his hand. It was tightly wrapped in bandages up to the elbow but the grip felt healthily firm. “What… where… Uh, come to think of it, this is none of my business. Welcome back.”

The courier grinned and nudged his shoulder jokingly. “Hey, ‘Cade. Missed me, eh? Sorry I come light-handed, had to hurry up. I’m… I’m flaking out, to be honest. Barely dragged myself past the Grub n' Gulp. Promise to spew my guts out as soon as I sleep it off.”

“Please don’t actually spew your guts out,” Arcade pleaded.

H looked at him in confusion for a moment and belatedly let out a helpless laugh. He raised the bandaged hand to rub his face tiredly. “Glad to see you too. Tell you what, meet me here in the morning, I’ll ready a wisecrack.”

Arcade waved him off in the direction of the nearest dorm and finished his tea. Broc flower in general was terribly bitter but mutfruit pulp imparted ameliorating sweetness. It was probably the only feasible result of his experiments with the pulp and one of the numerous practical ideas he came up with during the research. It was a shame that producing flavoured beverages was neither the purpose nor the priority of his work.

In the late morning the fort was quiet and the only other people around were Julie and Bill the machinist to whom she was tending. The old man was going through a strikingly severe case of fighting his alcoholic addiction and often injured himself during work so he was a regular patient of Julie’s. She cared for him the most out of the three former junkies she was set on overseeing.

Arcade only saw two of them - Bill and another one, an extensively balding man called Jacob, a chemist. He helped out with the research a couple of times but hardly gave off an impression of a changing person.

But the time the surprisingly tasty breakfast maize porridge - Julie called it mielie meel - was finished, he was slightly worried that he might have hallucinated H’s visit after drinking too much broc flower tea. He was silently going through the list of possible side effects and subsequent complications when his persistent hallucination appeared at the open gates once again.

The courier picked up the empty porridge bowl, settled down on one of the Atomic Wrangler wooden crates in its place and raised his brows at the attentive gaze. “Uh… hey, doc. Come here often?” He put the bowl away and composed his features into a friendly smile.

Arcade poked him in the shoulder. It was fleshy to the touch and most certainly solid. “You look way better,” he said.

“Yeah, six hours of sleep would do the thing.” H took off his Pip-boy and started unwinding the thick layer of bandages on his left hand. He was wearing the same leather outfit hopelessly bagging at the knees and elbows but one of the jacket sleeves was cut open and tied to his arm over the bandage with a leather strip.

He was doing fine on his own so Arcade sat back and gave him a closer look. H’s hair under the usual canvas cap was cut short and immediately stuck out in every direction when Arcade reached a hand and boldly pulled the vizor up. Its side finally grew back enough to cover the mess of stitches on his temple but the rest was almost the same length.

H glanced at him from rolling the sticky bandages up. “What, worried I finally enlisted?” he chuckled and took off the cap to tousle his hair. “Nah… got a friend with a steady hand. It’ll grow back soon enough.”

“Good for you. Want me to take a look?” Arcade asked and pointed at his bare arm. The skin was a bit flamed up and still reddish but it had clearly been burned a while ago, no less than a week or so, and had been healing adequately. H carelessly scraped away a clot of resinous salve and exfoliated skin from his forearm.

Arcade winced at the sight. “Ugh. Gross. How come there is no infection?.. “ He nimbly poised the stretched out arm by the fingertips and stooped over it. “That’s a far too large second degree for a regular scald. What happened?”

H did not hinder the examination and held still until Arcade waved his hand away. “Err, long story, a stupid accident. Who knew that two century old diesel generators aren’t all a cinch to fix? Didn’t sputter in my face, huh. Just gotta rub the balm in for a couple more days till the red is gone.” He showed Arcade a small jar with no label. “A dab left.”

“Let it dry out first.”

The courier nodded and sat cross-legged. “Alright. So, I’ve been to the front line. Brought some post and stayed ‘cause... it was hella dire out there, real bad, and they needed all the help they could get. So I stuck around until we got Nelson back. It’s an old outpost, used to be an army town. Ah, and I brought you a gift.”

Arcade looked at him with surprise. “What is the occasion?”

“No occasion. Thought it funny, that’s all.” H reached into his jacket pocket and took out a small book, barely a size of his palm. “It’s the Legion’s Latin teach yourself book. Alex, my friend in the army, said you’d love it if you really were as judgemental as I kept saying.”

“Stop telling people I’m judgemental.” Arcade took the book and turned it around. It was strikingly handmade, a journal of sorts, rather thick for a vade mecum. It was sloppishly bound and wrapped in a shabby leather cover.

“I am not that critical,” he asserted and opened the book.

H was waiting for the reaction with bated breath so he shamelessly burst out laughing as soon as Arcade let out a soft ‘oh’.

It was indeed a genuine Legion teach yourself handbook and it was abounding in grammar mistakes and phrasing errors, thoroughly composed by an illiterate person with scrawly handwriting. It was absolutely abhorrent, a piece of useless propaganda for tribal savages susceptible to Caesar’s convention of barbaric slaughter, slavery and degeneration. A poor phrasebook of quotes and common lexis the majority of the legionaries must have heard once in their lifetimes at best.

It had nothing to do with either Caesar or proper Latin, obviously, but it was glorious in its blatant ignorance. H was still snickering. Looking away from the copiously scribbled pages came to be no easy feat.

“Glad you love it.” The courier’s smug grin widened; it showed a recently-acquired gap in his teeth, a missing premolar on the left.

“Thank you.” Arcade said sincerely. “This was… unexpected.”

“Don’t mention it. Plus, maybe you get to teach me some.” H turned his Pip-boy on, showed him the screen in Eddie’s shadow and knocked a knuckle on the map somewhere in the west. “What do you say? Wanna hit the road again?”

Arcade tarried before giving an answer. He felt… eager about the invitation, letting it show would have been a little too personal for his comfort. “Road, yes.” He nodded. “I ran out of samples as well as witty ways of telling Julie that I am sitting idle. Teaching you by this monument of modern illiteracy, however? I hardly think so.”

“Why? Afraid I’ll best you at it?” H gave him a wink.

Arcade snorted sceptically and patted the Legion book on the weathered cover. “I did not say I wouldn’t teach you if you wanted. But it would require a great deal of patience and a larger textbook.”

H pulled his cut up sleeve up to the shoulder and started messily greasing his burns with the scentless salve. He shrugged. “I’m quite patient.”

“I know. The patience is for me.” Arcade chuckled. “Better let me bandage it. The road is long and I have no desire to amputate your arm in the field if it gets gangrenous.”

“Julie’s never threatened to amputate my limbs.” H pouted. “Maybe I should go to her.”

“Maybe you should.”

But Julie was nowhere to be seen and Arcade was still expectantly holding his hand out for the bandage roll. It was over in a few minutes. He safely tucked the ends under the rest of the layers and reached for the neglected bowl.

“Oh.” H let out an amazed sigh and put the Pip-boy and its mitt back on. “I can use the elbow now. Thanks!”

He stood up and shot a quick glance at the open gates. “Wait, gotta grab a bite first. Go get your doctor stuff, be right back. Eddie, stay.”

Arcade gave the eyebot a distrustful look and left. It took him less than ten minutes to wash the bowl and get ready. He had been keeping his medical bag unpacked in the locker since the last trip and all the spare specimens containers, simply due to the lack of such, were already sterilized and ready for use. He managed to cram everything handy in one bag and carefully settled the book on top.

It was one of the very few personal effects that he did not wear constantly, like glasses, or had not safely hidden away long ago. To be perfectly honest, it was now the only personal thing he owned ex mero motu as need had never arisen. He decided to regard it as a preposterous extension of the Followers’ library.

They set off as soon as H returned and reached Novac in less than three hours with no delays. The town did not change much except for the noticeably larger amount of Brahmins all over the town, peacefully grazing in the pens. The cattle looked well-nourished, very much so in comparison to the dire state they were initially found in.

Arcade nodded at the untethered caravan Brahmin hanging about in the kitchen tent. “You didn’t tell me Novac had a new chef.”

H snorted. “The chef looks yummy. Uh... kinda hungry now…” He hanged the backpack over on one shoulder and unzipped its spacious insides. “Okay, gotta stay for like, two hours? You’re okay with that, right? Been away for damn long... Plus, I’ve got some post for H-One troops. You know where to find the key and all that.”

“Take your time.”

“Cliff’s got some grub in the Dinky shop. Don’t wait for me if you wanna eat.” H pointed at the dinosaur, waved him goodbye and headed to the houses down the road.

It was warm outside and the wasteland was glutted with opulent midday sunlight as far as the eye could see. Daisy had dragged a rickety chair out of her room and was sitting in a large patch of sunshine on the second floor, safely barricading one of the corridor entrances from anyone willing to go upstairs.

She was wearing thick-lensed reading glasses and only put the magazine she was perusing down when Arcade casually leaned on the shaky railing next to her.

“Just what I was wishing for.” She smiled and covered her eyes with a palm to look up at him against the light. “Welcome back, sweetheart.”

He bent down and gave her a peck on the wrinkled cheek. “You were thinking about me?”

Daisy playfully waved the magazine at him. “Always do, my boy. But I’ve also been thinking about that bottle of Sarsaparilla in my room...” She let out a jocose chuckle. “Be a dear and grab it from the table for me, would you? There are some Brahmin noodles left in the pot and a whole stack of crispy maize cakes, do help yourself. Ain’t gonna look as dashing if undernourished, am I right?”

Arcade snorted and pushed the door open. He had long learned not to thwart Daisy in any way, whether it be having a decent meal or politely turning a deaf ear to her unwaveringly fond compliments regarding him being all grown up. After all, it would have taken him a medical condition not to be a grown up in his thirties.

He obediently spooned out a heap of noodles into a chipped bowl. There were thick slices of Brahmin meat floating around among the shreds of derelict Pre-War dough and they smelled ridiculously majestic.

The only other wholesome food that Arcade had come across since leaving California was served in a saloon in Goodsprings where the abundance of geckos and the slow pace of life allowed for preparing complex dishes from more than two ingredients at a time. Either that or the saloon mistress was simply a better cook than the rest of the wasteland.

“Had I known that you took up cooking I would certainly have risked coming to Novac on my own.” He pulled a second chair outside and turned his back to the sun. “Here you are, a relatively cool reasonably uncontaminated Sarsaparilla.”

Daisy took the bottle and opened it on the edge of the railing with a pinpoint slam. “Oh, don’t praise me, I’m a hopeless cook,” she said. “Andy the ranger made me these for fixing his flimsy ham radio. Lent me this piece of shit journal as well.” She took the magazine from the railing and gave it an expressive shake.

Arcade chuckled. “Internal medicine. Planning on becoming a doctor?”

“Sweetheart, if I suffered from as much senile shit as I can diagnose myself with based on this garbage I’d be long dead.” Daisy laughed and took a large sip from the bottle. “Andy’s a kind one. Poor soul doesn’t leave Novac these days so the only things he cares about are that damn leg of his and the radio. Uses it to Morse to his NCR friends. Well now, how’s the soup?”

 “Nourishing… and tasty,” Arcade mumbled with a mouthful of noodles. “Any news?”

Daisy leaned back relaxedly and was watching him eat with such an adoring expression that he almost felt his whole face warm up. It was hardly unusual given the sunny weather but he sighed and put the bowl down nonetheless. “Please don’t stare.”

“Oh, very well.” She let out a sigh and reluctantly turned her face to the sun. “Could’ve brought me a pic of yourself to look at then… humour an old lady a tad… What now?.. The news, right. The news is scarce. Ain’t much happening around Novac except for those ghouls at the rocket site, ah and the McBrides’ new herd. Those two-headed fellas settled in just fine.”

The bowl was not very large and it did not take long for the noodles to be finished. Arcade placed the empty dish on the railing. “Did ranger Andy also cook those maize cakes you mentioned?..” he tested the waters.

Daisy shook her head with a sharp laugh. “You wish, sweetheart. Bought ‘em from a trader the other day, ain’t stale yet. Get ‘em here, must be in the upper drawer. And take this.” She handed him the emptied bottle. “Put it in the trash.”

Collecting trash was seemingly considered meaningless by most wasteland dwellers. Although it was not entirely sterile in the Followers’ facilities back in the Boneyard, it was clean, mainly because knowing the comprehensive list of most common infections by heart provided good motivation. Not many people around Nevada bothered to tidy up their own cluttered up abodes, let alone littered towns they resided in. Arcade had oftentimes seen Freeside visitors and locals alike carelessly toss away used up packs, syringes, ammo shells and crumpled pieces of whatever they felt like discarding (typically anything short of caps).

Wild animals knew better than to squat where they ate but modern age homo irradiatur had yet to evolve to their level.

It was different for Daisy, and should have been for every other person decent enough not to wallow in their own garbage. Sometimes Arcade wondered what growing up in Navarro must have been like, sheltered from the outside world on a spotless secluded station in an ocean hopelessly polluted long before the bombs fell. He was still a child of the wasteland, one of many, albeit a lot less untidy.

The family did not expatiate upon the times before they became known as remnants - never in detail and rarely about anything apart from everyday soldier lives. Few had heart to question the Enclave since the alternative was harsh, dirty and filled to the brim with newly created super mutants, centaurs and other abhorrent neighbours to share the outdoors with. Even so, it did not prevent Henry from fleeing into the wasteland when he wished so.

Arcade used to think that if he cast more light on his past he would be able to better comprehend the present. For lack of any means of discovering more about his parents he turned his attention to learning about their ancestors, except years of studying history only trained him to recognize repeated mistakes. Other people’s, for the most part.

Daisy did not press the conversation after he passed her the cakes and they spent some time discussing the REPCONN ghouls. Apparently the nearby rocket site had been infested with ferals and super mutants for quite some time, and while the latter were only spotted in the area as corpses, the former were a threat for both Novac and its surroundings.

The ferals did not stay at the site and often wandered closer to the town to be eventually shot dead by the locals. A group of sapient ghouls had supposedly barricaded themselves in the rocket facility but no one had been reckless enough to check for sure.

“Ain’t going there anymore.” Daisy gestured to her patchily duct-taped rifle propped against the wall. “Last time I stopped by for parts some half-naked piece of human jerky almost ripped my stock off. Those feral pals are swift, swifter than ‘em old bones. Traded what Stimpaks I had left for a rusty control board and a cracked adapter but got enough scrap to tinker with till summer, with any luck.”

Arcade chuckled. “Well, I doubt they are planning on setting off to space. You will have your rocket engines back soon enough… now, let me see what I have on me.” He reached for his overstuffed bag, pulled out the sack full of empty containers and some other things and started rooting about the meds on the bottom.

The bulk of his inventory was composed of drugs suited for soldiers on the front lines that an elderly woman leading a moderately peaceful life would have no use in. Arcade put aside a bunch of Stimpaks along with two syringes of Med-X and placed a sealed sac with several doses of Cateye on top with a contemplative hum.

“These are a precaution, in case things get violent one day,” he explained. “Or night, thus the Cateye.”

“Used to have a funny-looking headset for that.” Daisy put her reading glasses back on and skimmed through the worn-out Cateye bottle label. “What's that... communist killing power, eh?.. You need these more, sweetheart. When am I to take ‘em? While stumbling to the lav?”

“All the better if you never get to use them,” Arcade said and started orderly packing the rest of his stuff back into the bag. “I have more than enough to get through a couple more wars unharmed and heal people along the way. If utilized thriftily, naturally.”

“Fine then. As long as you do not deprive yourself for my sake... And what’s that?” Daisy pointed at the small black book on top of the pile. “Travel notes?”

Arcade showed her the Legion journal. “Light reading. I haven’t had a moment to study it in depth yet. H, the courier with the eyebot, gave it to me this morning.”

Daisy carefully opened the book and huffed at the Latin scribbles. “It’s that ancient history gibberish of yours, innit? I remember Henry was rather fond of it as well in his younger days… “ She flipped through the slovenly bound pages. “Was he the one who hooked you on it?.. I think so... He constantly gave you mechanic stuff to play with, like cyber paws and wrenches, ah and those rubbery synt organs he was working on as a side project… your ma was furious.”

She let out a soft nostalgic laugh and Arcade could not hold back a smile. “Yeah, battling a bunch of soldiers over my upbringing must have been toilsome.”

“Very much so. And look at you, we ain’t without hope.” Daisy chuckled. “Henry got a habit of reading med books to you ‘cause you liked the lingo. Never blubbered as loudly when he went over the bones index.”

“That sounds questionably specific.”

Daisy gave him a probing look through her pebble glasses. “You bet a respectable old lady would remember more than a chubby tot chewing on her chopper lever.”

“Nonsense.” Arcade crossed his arms with a sceptical snort. “You would never let a civilian into your cockpit, let alone an infant.”

“True enough. Pretty sure Henry left an imprint though, why else would you fancy this mumbo jumbo...” She shook her head and looked down at the closed book. “They say the invading army speaks it.”

“Speaking would be a considerable exaggeration but the Legion does draw upon Latin to repackage the same warlike rhetoric of violence and destruction.” There was nothing to fiddle with so Arcade clasped his hands impulsively to keep them busy.

Daisy was listening to him closely as she always did so he made an effort to intelligibly articulate his opinion. “That kind of rhetoric appeals to the most primitive instincts and does not necessitate oratory to attract the audience. Caesar can cite Cato to suit his purpose but the language and the imitative social regime are for show. I doubt that the pawns understand the meaning behind their actions.” His frown deepened. “This book further supports my speculation, if you are interested in facts.”

“Sweetheart, I just want you to be safe and happy.” Daisy reached out a hand and gave his forearm a gentle squeeze. “I ain’t a soldier anymore. Last time a war troubled me was forty years ago, so I say as long as that Caesar person ain’t going around bothering my neighbours I don’t give a damn about his rubbish.”

“I just hope decent people are still around in New Vegas when Fortification Hill is finally purged... There are plenty of ways to die out there, and most of them have nothing to do with war.” Arcade took the journal from Daisy’s hands and opened it randomly at the list of phrases intended to be charcoaled on compound walls.

Truly, hominem unius libri timeo. Even if it was not the Bible.

“Now now, enough with ‘em sorrows,” Daisy declared with her usual vibrant cheer. “Being all cut up ain’t gonna do good. And what of that courier lad you mentioned, what did you call him again?.. H, huh? What kind of name is that?”

Arcade shrugged. “Probably short for something… I didn’t ask.” He carefully fit the Legion book into the organized mess in his bag and finally zipped it up. “You see, I was more concerned about him rushing headlong into strictly confidential Enclave history and being watched by the Brotherhood.”

“Sure hope it’s not Henry, like that ol’ rascal.” Daisy stifled a girlish chuckle. “I’m just glad you made a friend, sweetheart. Better have someone watch your six.”

“I suppose. From your point of view, certainly.” Arcade did not argue. He had never been an expert on camaraderie.

“Ain’t it all quite the same?” Daisy asked rhetorically.

She gave him an encouraging smile and stood up to do the dishes. He dragged his chair back inside and thought musedly of the years that the family had lived as remnants of an enclosed organization destroyed in a loud bang. Not many of them were alive anymore but those who were proved to be even worse than him at social bonding. Turned out that Enclave-sized skeletons had a tendency to fall out of their closets with loud clatter.


	7. V/II

 

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The sunshine patch Daisy had been sitting in had barely moved closer to the stairs when they heard familiar eyebot beeping nearby. She fondly patted Arcade on the cheek and wished him safe travels at parting before leaning back in the chair and drawing the straw hat over her eyes with a relaxed hum.

H was carrying an armload of rusty junk topped with a bent motorcycle handlebar. He sprang up the stairs in two bounces and beamed at them from the other side of the corridor. “What’s up? Afternoon, ma’am. Gimme a sec, gotta drop these off,” he jabbered along the way and deftly knocked on the nearest door with a heel. “Hey Bruce, Mrs. Gibson scrapped more bike stuff for you.”

The door opened with a creak. A well groomed dark-skinned gentleman let H in and after a short conversation locked him out again with a cautious peek outside. Arcade gave the door a suspicious look.

He waited for H to catch up with him at the stairs. “Are you ready to leave?” he asked.

“Yeah, all set. Did I make you wait for too long? Sorry, oughta scavenge a wrist watch one of these days.” H let out a half smile. He was not late, however, the two hours they had set upon earlier had just passed.

Arcade did not bother to point it out. They passed through Novac and turned south in the direction of the old railway junction. The tracks were not the usual road they took on the way to I-15 primarily because it led through the hills inhabited by radscorpions. The radscorpions per se were not a problem as opposed to retreating from them down bumpy hillsides.

The scenery on the way was rather monotonous. Two spans of towers supporting overhead power lines stretched alongside the surprisingly well-preserved railway. Most of electricity in the wasteland was provided by low-voltage generators and there was little use in scrapping Pre-War wiring so a large part of it remained in place despite the atomic apocalypse and harsh weather conditions during the centuries to follow.

“Gotta pass through a ranger station, roughly a half an hour detour,” H explained while they were strolling along the railroad. “Andy the ranger asked me to check up on his fellas, they haven’t responded since the pilot lady fixed his ham so he got worried. You met the pilot lady, right?”

“You were watching me?” Arcade arched a brow.

H stumbled on a prominent sleeper and stepped over the rails to avoid walking on the tracks. “Not intentionally, no. Noticed you on the way back and she’s the only one wearing a straw hat around Novac. She’s nice, and an amazing mechanic, especially when something needs to be taken to pieces. A real talent.”

Arcade looked away to conceal a proud smile. “Yeah, she is… she seems very pleasant. Her name is Daisy.”

“Right.” H chuckled. “Like a flower. From the songs.”

The ranger station heaved in sight just as they walked past a Pre-War nuclear waste disposal site. There was a large pile of orange and white barrels heaped up offroad but those were far enough for H’s Pip-boy geiger counter not to detect any radiation.

Judging from the heaps of discarded vehicles utilized as a makeshift perimeter fortification, the area used to be a trailer park, one of many in the Mojave. They approached the entrance and stopped short of the NCR flag neatly painted on a wooden sign.

“Something’s wrong,” H breathed suddenly and made a warning gesture. They were securely hidden behind a concrete wall protecting the station on the forefront. He swiftly caught Eddie by one of the antennas and forced the eyebot to lower to the ground.

Arcade shared the alarm. The outpost was eerily silent, no soldiers in sight - even if there were very few troops at the station to begin with, at least one guard outside should have been overlooking the approach.

H shifted on his feet hesitantly and cast a glance back. “Wait here,” he whispered, already unholstering his gun. “Whatever you hear - don’t come unless it’s Eddie zapping like crazy, understood? Can be traps all over.”

“Understood.” Arcade nodded. “Just signal if you need me.”

The eyebot floated up as soon as H let go of its antenna. He watched them enter the gates and peered over the wall but there was a large pile of Pre-War garbage in the way so he could not see what was happening at the station. He crouched out of sight, held the Defender close and waited.

It was quiet at first, then a muffled clap sounded, followed by indistinct rattle. Arcade would not recognize a detonating frag mine by ear but it sounded suspiciously like one. He stood up and looked over the wall again but he could not see anything from behind the garbage pile and would not risk disobeying an urgent advice unless absolutely necessary.

Then he heard stumbling footsteps approaching at quick pace.

“It’s me,” a familiar voice spoke from behind the corner. “Don’t shoot.”

Something did not feel right. Arcade lowered the Defender and stepped through the gate but H firmly pulled him back by the shoulder on his way out. There were fresh splotches of blood smeared all over his bandaged hand and some more on the jaw. Arcade reflexively took a step back.

“Are you?..” The question trailed off.

H looked unharmed at the closer look, albeit sickly pale. He swallowed hard and looked back at the station. “They… it’s, it was the Legion, they’re all… I’m… “ he mumbled and pressed a hand to his mouth. “I’m… ooh, I’m gonna be sick.”

He squatted down heavily next to the concrete wall and buried his head in both hands with a stifled groan.

“I’m sorry,” Arcade said. He did not know what else to say so he just sat down next to H and handed him a bottle of water.

He never travelled to the front line and only passed through Nipton after it had already been swept out by the NCR. He had seen few of the Legion’s atrocities with his own eyes. Those were all needlessly cruel and overwhelmingly bloody acts, like crucifixion, and torture, and dismemberment. Caesar wanted the war to be terrifying, thus his mongrels made it so.

But the slain ranger station was not on the front line, it was in the NCR territory. Searchlight and Nipton, and that other town H mentioned, used to be the closest settlements to the river and they had all been ravaged when the Legion started making their way northward. Novac was in less than half an hour to the north, hardly a long journey for a group of Legion soldiers. Arcade felt a lump form in his throat.

“We need to go back,” H managed after a pause. “Tell ranger Andy, he’ll send word to the command. Radio here is d… it’s broken. They burned it, and… sorry. Crap, staying here is dangerous, and stupid. Let’s go, real fast.”

He scrambled to his feet and hastily thrust the half-empty water bottle back into Arcade’s hands. They left without delay and took the train tracks back to Novac in silence. H turned around from time to time and stumbled backwards, watching the monotonous scenery closely, but there wasn‘t a single Legion assassin tailing them.

All they could do was warn the people. The NCR command had its own vision of optimal troops distribution, losing a group of soldiers in a Legion attack would not make them deploy twice as many in their stead. Arcade did not care for the NCR soldiers, not as much as he did for the people of Mojave, and one certain person close to him. People of Novac would be naive to delude themselves about possible help from Helios One outpost.

“They gotta send reinforcements ‘cause they care about that sun energy plant,” H assured before darting off to ranger Andy’s bungalow. “Plus, Novac’s right on ol’ 95. Can’t risk the Legion strolling along the highway, can they…”

He sounded equally hopeful and certain. Arcade wanted to believe him, he truly did, but the suffocating lump in his throat made it hard to regain his temper. It was harder to ignore than the unceasing tremor in his hands when he knocked on Daisy’s door, trying and predictably failing to think of any guaranteed way to ensure her safety.

He left her a handful of Buffout pills heedless of her objections and persistently inquired about the ammo she had stored until she showed him a crammed locker under her bed and told him off for being a worrywart.

Arcade would not dare teach a fish how to swim, Daisy was absolutely capable of handling herself in wartime and it was foolish of him to bother her with his immoderate concern in the first place. He backed away and mumbled an embarrassed apology but she disregarded it with a cheerful laugh and clasped him tight to her bosom. It did not rid him of the tension completely but it helped.

Eddie was floating next to Dinky’s tail when Arcade sneaked outside. The eyebot could not fit in the staircase to the sniper nest without ruining the neatly organized display and made the shopkeeper mad so H usually left it at the entrance.

He did not notice Arcade’s brief absence on the way to the dinosaur, or did not ask about it when they left the town again, or was too ingenuous a person to give a damn. Keeping secrets from him felt needless but Arcade knew very well that if he wanted to avoid lying he should have stayed in the old fort.

A pair of marksmen and a combat eyebot would never be sufficient to defeat the Legion but they were enough to make a difference around the Mojave. There were plenty of people in the wasteland to save from trouble and even more to inflict irrevocable harm upon.

Arcade kept to himself until they reached Primm late in the evening and settled down on the old roller coaster track next to Bison Steve’s back entrance. The sun was already down but it was not dark; the wasteland was still enshrouded in purplish twilight haze. It made the crumbling carcass of El Diablo look like a giant flatworm.

They came outside to have a meal but had not touched Mrs. Nash’s rapidly cooling gecko kebabs yet. Arcade was agonizing over the threadbare dualism of ‘the common good’ and large scale results and H was struggling to wash the set-in blood stains off his bandage in the greenish light of his Pip-boy.

“They say that doubt leads to certainty,” Arcade said and winced at his own voice. “That if you ponder long enough on a matter you will form a reasoned opinion. But the more I think it over the more I question my rectitude.”

“Your what?” H looked up at him from the hopelessly soiled bandage.

“My… my morality, I question if I am doing everything right.” Arcade picked his kebab up and pulled a cold banana yucca piece off the stick.

It was still crispy and tasted like jalapeño. The gecko meat also tasted like jalapeño, and the air as well as his mouth were starting to taste the same. H hummed in response and screwed the cap onto the dirty water bottle.

“Right enough for my part,” he said and raised his brows at Arcade’s sharp breathes. “Too hot today?.. Damn, sorry, no bothering Mrs. Nash while she cooks…”

They fell silent for a moment. H was trying to bite the chewy gecko pieces off his stick without smearing the hot sauce all over his face and the kebabs were trying to burn holes in their upper gastrointestinal tracts. The food tasted fine, however, and the gecko was slightly less spicy. Besides, the meal was going to annihilate whatever bacteria tagged along.

Arcade let out a long exhale and put the stick with the last piece of yucca aside. “Let’s hope it manages to digest faster than it sets us on fire. And… I understand that you consider me a tolerable person, otherwise you would not travel with me. What I am trying to say is that if I really want things to change… shouldn’t I do better than a lost case research and occasional ex gratia heroics?”

It was getting darker; Arcade was hoping that the shadows would conceal his despair but H held his Pip-boy hand up to give them more light.

“What you got in mind?” he asked.

“Fighting. As the saying goes, igitur qui desiderat pacem praeparet bellum: if you desire peace, be ready to fight for it. Don’t get me wrong, I am not willing to rush into battle, even somewhat scared, to be honest.” Arcade turned his gaze to the dark silhouette of the roller coaster flatworm. “But no matter how long I ponder I cannot think of a better way to make a difference than infiltrate Fortification Hill and assassinate Caesar where he stands. Assuming that he does not have the novice vigilante crucified, that is.”

“You’re wrong to think that the Legion ends with Caesar’s death,” H disagreed, twiddling with the dirty kebab stick. “I’ve been to the Fort, he got lots of lieutenants in fancy helmets, bet there’s a guy to replace him. He’s, like, in his what, sixties?”

“Excuse me, you’ve what?” Arcade thought that he had misheard the middle bit but the man looked so dumbfounded that his very expression alone provided the answer. “What?.. How?! Were you…”

“A legionary?” H resented. “Of course not!”

There were only two ways to enter the Legion territory that Arcade was aware of and he did not mean the improbable. “A slave,” he finished a bit softer. “I wanted to ask if you were a slave but I understand that you do not have to answer.”

“No… no, I wasn’t, it’s okay.” H awkwardly cleared his throat. “Only been there for a few hours, in February or so… Well, err… You probably heard that I’m allowed into Mr. House’s casino, right? Got hired for a delivery last year, and, um… nevermind... Anyway, turned out Caesar also heard about my free pass and wanted to have a talk. Sent an invitation to take the barge with one of the wolf-hat guys.”

Arcade let out a distrustful harrumph. “That would be suicide.”

“Exactly, but I, uh, it was all kinda new back then and I wanted to, how did you say?.. ponder on the matter to form an opinion…” H fell silent for a moment. “Mr. House talked me into taking the trip. The Legion’s been squattin’ on his bunker since the war began, he wanted me to activate it. And Caesar wanted it blasted ‘cause it’s been making him real itchy. No idea why he asked me of all people to handle it, he knew I brought the key, could’ve just taken it. Guess the legionaries aren’t any good with science?.. Me neither but Mr. House helped... Caesar said some stuff but I was, like, real busy being scared shitless... Some deeply unsettling crap, that’s for sure.”

The story sounded as surreal as absurd could go but it did not strike Arcade as a fabrication entirely. After all, H’s visits to Lucky 38 had been a major event for the residents of New Vegas since the beginning. No one else was allowed inside the casino, and everyone was afraid of the Securitrons guarding it for a good reason, especially since the integral missile launchers came into play. The speculation, needless to say, was highly abundant.

“So you blew up the bunker and then what?” Arcade asked.

H hesitated. “I, um… Well, not exactly… Kinda did the opposite, actually. I turned it on like Mr. House asked, it was noisy for a bit and the ground shook, so I sealed the doors, palmed the guard off with some vague shit about explosives and left real quick. Never heard from them again.”

“You… you are telling me… that you double-crossed Caesar? You want me to believe that you actually deceived Caesar - the Caesar! - and got away with it? Betrayed the most imperious person in the Mojave just like that and ran off to the front line to… to slay his minions for the NCR?” Arcade gasped in disbelief and helplessly threw his hands up. “And you got away with that as well?!”

He stressed the last bit a little too much. H started mumbling something in his defense but quickly broke off. He looked disconcerted and completely taken aback. Arcade raised a slightly trembling hand and smoothed down his hair in silence, almost knocking his glasses off sloppily along the way.

“I’m sorry. It’s safe to travel with me, promise. Wouldn’t drag you along otherwise.” H turned to him with the most apologetic expression. “I’m a sniper, remember? They don’t see me pull the trigger. Plus, can’t tell Caesar if they’re dead.”

Arcade shook his head bemusedly. “I am not worried about myself, dumbass.”

“It’s mister dumbass to you,” H uttered hoarsely after a pause.

He turned the Pip-boy light off. They stayed outside for a quarter longer and watched the pearly patch of the full moon brighten up in the night sky. It was too late by then to joke about dropping formalities so Arcade let it slide.

In the following couple of weeks he got two letters from Daisy: one praising H for ridding Novac of some nighttime singer who had assumed a habit of chanting right next door to her and one reporting a copious amount of NCR reinforcements in the area.

The Legion - for the time being, at least - remained across the river and off the radar.


	8. VI

 

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The best thing about Goodsprings was undeniably Miss Trudy’s cookery. The meals at Prospector Saloon were consistently delicious, wholesome and served in large quantities - so large that H was the only one capable of cramming a dessert on top.

Arcade was sitting across the booth from him and only briefly looked up from the Legion journal he had been enthusiastically correcting with a red pencil stub when Miss Trudy put a plate on their table.

“Get well soon, hon.” She smiled and patted H on the shoulder. It was a rather weird choice of phrasing since the courier had been especially healthy lately, surprisingly so, given his habit of injuring himself.

“Get well?..”

“A local joke, so to say.” H was already champing on a mouthful of Miss Trudy’s signature barrel cactus fruit pie. “What? Wanna try?”

“No.” Arcade let out a soft chuckle and returned to his book. As appealing as it seemed, the pie was out of the question for at least a couple more hours.

The amount of food that H consumed if given the chance was stupefying. He never indulged on the road and only asked for two pieces instead of one if starving but once they happened to stay somewhere for longer than a day he transformed into a human-sized gullet devouring three-course meals like those were nothing.

It was their second day in Goodsprings and the transformation had successfully begun.

“Sure you don’t wanna try?” H asked again when only a small piece was left on the plate.

Arcade shook his head without looking up. He was struggling to figure out the messy notes on Caesar’s Praetorian guard. Roman military organization had never been his area of expertise and given that the Legion was rather imitating the original than reproducing it understanding the details was problematic. Besides, the reference source left much to Arcade’s own imagination.

He let out a huff and closed the journal with a loud thud. “What a load of Brahmin shit.”

H finished thoroughly scraping the plate and sat back with a content sigh. “Cheer up, ‘Cade, you’re gonna crack it eventually.” He cocked his head to the side and looked at Arcade with the same smug grin his mouth assumed whenever the journal came in handy. “Aren’t you the wasteland’s top extinct lingo expert?”

“Yeah, indisputably a facile princeps. Very funny. It would be much easier if I had any Roman Empire books at hand.” Arcade sighed. “And I mean any at all, the things that currently have me at a loss are basic military hierarchy.”

“Hold that thought,” H said and stood up to get them two bottles of Sarsaparilla from the counter. He opened them and passed one over. “So, that empire. What’s so cool about it?”

“It was actually one of the periods of Roman history. But likely the most influential, thanks to all the conquering that was going on during its rise. It shaped the ancient world culture and in many respects influenced Pre-War… and modern society, as you can see,” Arcade mused and took a sip of warm Sarsaparilla from the bottle. “Wait, are you genuinely interested or?..”

“Genuinely interested,” H assured. “But I’d appreciate less smart words and more funny stuff.”

Arcade chuckled. “Fine. A man called Julius Caesar rose to power as the supreme Dictator back when it was the Roman Republic. Under his rule it prospered and expanded, absorbing the nearby cultures and uniting them under his banner. Eventually it grew so large it had to be divided into two parts to facilitate the governing process. Caesar had long been murdered by then, of course, but his legacy remained.”

He shot a glance at his audience but H was still listening attentively so he took another sip and continued. “Both their civil and military infrastructure outpaced most because they had plenty of resources to pour into it. Roman input into... virtually everything that had been happening in the western world ever since is immeasurable. Civil engineering, architecture, ancient literature, a group of languages - you name it. The Roman Empire built things to last, and they did. Roads, cities, shrines, arenas… It was a brutal nation and a violent civilization but it was nothing like the Legion you know.”

H stopped toying with his bottle cap. “So it wasn’t all about war?”

“No civilization grounded solely on war effort is going to last.” Arcade huffed. “Much unlike what modern Caesar seems to think. I would hope for the best but as they say, graviora manent - the worst is yet to come. He says, actually, it is a quote by Virgil, one of the greatest Roman poets... I quote him rather often, he was the author of a number of famous Latin poems, very inspirational.”

“You call ‘the worst is yet to come’ inspirational?” H snorted. ”Yeah, right, what a joy. When was all that happening anyway?”

Arcade hummed. “About… um, not to be mistaken… two thousand and three hundred years ago?” he surmised. It came out as a rough guess but it was as close as he could get without an encyclopedia.

H choked on his Sarsaparilla. “You’re joking,” he breathed out. “No way!”

Miss Trudy came to take their plates so Arcade did his best to stifle laughter. He had gotten so used to history, especially ancient history, that two millennia hardly seemed like a big deal. He never considered how it should have sounded to an unwonted ear.

H spent the rest of the evening awestruck and did not interfere with Arcade’s reading. It was already getting late but they usually stayed in the saloon until closing. It was quiet unless the caravans came around. Miss Trudy passed the time knitting behind the counter and did not pay much attention to them. There was nothing to do in Goodsprings after sunset anyway.

They came to the town to lend Sunny the ginger huntress a hand (or rather, four hands and a tesla cannon) with the nesting geckos. It was impossible to destroy all the numerous nests before the eggs hatched as well as approach them while the whelps were still little so Sunny usually waited until the beginning of May and hired a couple of hunters to thin out the adult population.

It took them three days straight to rid the Goodsprings source from the geckos, that was a lot even compared to the usual gecko-infested state of the town surroundings. They cleared the path to the overlook first thing in the morning and split up: H took his usual sniper position splayed on the dirty mattress atop the cliff, Eddie stayed to watch his six and Arcade joined Sunny and her dog in chasing geckos around the wasteland.

The first two days were particularly exhausting because they had to drag the carcasses away from the source to prevent pollution. There was enough to supply everyone with meat and hides for months; the locals helped but it was still time-consuming and tiring work.

They took lunch breaks in the afternoon and wrapped the hunt up at sunset. H joined them on the chase when his aim was starting to falter and spent the rest of the hunt rubbing at his right eye violently enough to scoop it out after hours of staring into the scope.

He never complained, however. Arcade tried to keep an eye on him but refrained from comments as there already was a doctor in Goodsprings, a pleasant old man with a spectacular moustache. H had mentioned that the man was a surgeon and that he came from a Vault so his medical expertise must have been considerable in comparison to regular wasteland physicians.

They did not have a chance to talk but Doc Mitchell had become noticeably more welcoming since he managed to lure H away for an inspection on the third day and found his condition satisfactory. Arcade did not consider that to be his own accomplishment in any way but as long as the old man did not purse his lips at him under that magnificent moustache he was ready to play along.

By the time the great hunt was finished the area had not been rid from the geckos entirely, of course, but the aim - to reasonably thin out their population - had been achieved. They spent a couple more hours before dark burning the carcasses that had not been carried off by the townsfolk or purchased by the trading caravans that had come all the way to Goodsprings specifically for the gecko hides season. There were quite a few left.

H squatted down next to the almost burned out gecko funeral pyre they had lit up outside of town and stretched his hands forward. “Damn, smells delicious… but I’m so full…” He sighed.

“Yikes, what are you, a coyote?” Sunny chortled and offered the last piece of dinner leftovers to her dog. “Huh, no fancy?.. Wonder if you’re also full or just more picky than the Goodsprings’ one of a kind coyote man.” She scratched Cheyenne on the furry scruff.

The dog was very independent and only allowed the others occasional pats on the sides but mellowed at the mistress’ touch every time.

“Yeah, hit me when I’m down, dead tired after helping you,” H gruntled. He stood up and moved away from the smouldering fire back to their makeshift seating.

Sunny gently shooed Cheyenne from her lap and moved closer to Arcade to clear some space on the mattress for him. It was already dark and the houses of Goodsprings had turned into mere dark shadows barely visible from the distance. Only two patches of light were relentlessly fighting the surrounding murk: the saloon sign, almost as bright as the spires of New Vegas Strip, and Doc Mitchell’s house on the hill, the ultimate beacon of hope in the vast expanse of the Mojave.

H settled down, still grumbling under his breath that he would expect any grill to smell nice even if it was totally not edible. Sunny nudged Arcade in the knee and they exchanged jocular looks.

“It is all about the fragrant palette of postmortem winds and carrion entrails baked to cinders in own juice,” he assented jokingly. “And all that tantalizing cadaverine and putrescine? What a delicacy.”

“My goodness. If only we knew chemistry.” H gave him a sarcastic smirk.

Sunny snorted merrily. “Whoa, mean! I like him. Hey doc, wanna ditch the sniper boy and stay in ‘Springs? We got stiff drinks, a jukebox and a whole upland thick with critters. Nothin’ to do except huntin’ and farmin’, nowhere to go except the source...” She made a theatrical gesture to the water tower hill. “... and then the cemetery.”

Arcade genuinely cracked up. “How uncharacteristically grim, Miss Smiles!”

“Must be somethin’ in the water.” She chuckled and stretched her legs with a groan as she stood up. “Alright, boys, Trudy’s gonna be closing soon and I’m short a bedtime drink. You two comin’?”

They nodded simultaneously, swiftly stamped the cinders out and dragged the mattress back to the town on their way to the saloon. It was pleasantly quiet at the late hour; the majority of the patrons migrated to their homes as soon as the jukebox fell silent. Only Easy Pete, the bighorner shepherd, was sitting at the bar. He gave them a friendly nod.

Miss Trudy slid a half-full glass across the counter. “One bourbon, on the house.”

“That’ll be my sedative. Cheers,” Sunny said joyfully and emptied the glass in a single large gulp. “Ooh, still kickin’. Thanks, ma’am. Take care, all, see you tomorrow.”

She whistled Cheyenne along and left for the night. H dumped a pile of caps on the bar and started counting them. Arcade sat down on the nearby stool and watched him divide the caps into several smaller stacks.

“Feeling thirsty? I can take care of that.” Miss Trudy said. “What can get you, hon?”

“There.” H put the last cap down and turned to Arcade. “Wanna have a drink?”

The alternative would be to return to the abandoned shack on the southern edge of the town and toss and turn on the only narrow bed wakefully for hours next to H’s ever-vacant sleeping bag. They were both exhausted, far too exhausted to doze off instead of staring at the ceiling. Besides, a drink sounded just right.

Arcade nodded. “Yeah. Yes, I do. Not bourbon, however. Miss Trudy, do you happen to have something else?.. Whiskey, at least.”

They settled on a bottle of whiskey and four Sarsaparillas. H managed to cram most of them into enormous pockets of the old farmer’s jacket he had found lying about in the shack they were occupying and had been wearing around Goodsprings ever since, primarily because it was much more convenient to work the farm in.

It took Arcade two disgusting fire gecko stains on the Followers’ coat and four laborious washes to agree to change into a flannel shirt H had dug up for him somewhere. He was all but certain that it used to belong to Doc Mitchell but unable to provide reasoning why that was considered a bad thing.

The shirt proved to be comfortable and warm, however, and most importantly not white, so he relented soon enough.

Miss Trudy waved them off and locked the saloon doors behind them with a loud scrape of metal bars against wood. The sign above their heads flickered and turned off; the whole town instantly plunged into darkness. Arcade would imagine at least a window or two to be illuminated but it looked like they were the only ones staying up.

“Come on, I know just the place.” H beckoned him through the nearest passage between the buildings and then past the thickets of maize crops by a fenced-in farm.

The road was rocky and they stumbled at every step in the dark. Arcade all but toppled over a cactus’ gnarled trunk when his boot got caught in something and almost broke his glasses on one of Eddie’s antennas.

“Care to turn the light on before we cripple ourselves?” He huffed.

“Can’t,” H replied in a low voice. “Coyotes.”

Arcade felt a firm grip on his forearm and begrudgingly let himself to be tugged along up the hillside. It was a surprisingly steep ascent, and given Goodsprings’ lowland position he could think of a few destinations located up high, or rather, only one destination: the cemetery.

“Wait a second, am I playing Virgil to your Dante?” he jested.

H hushed him with a light squeeze on the arm and did not reply until they finally reached the hilltop. There was a luminous glow gleaming on the horizon: the night sun of the Mojave, the lights of Strip shining bright upon the coal black wasteland. The dark outline of the water tower looming over the cemetery stood out sharply against it.

Arcade withdrew his hand and listened to H’s unintelligible swearing as he scrabbled around in the dark. Then a flickering light ignited, flaring up gradually.

“You were saying?..” The courier asked and held a small oil lantern up. “Huh, wasn’t that Virgil guy a poet?”

Arcade nodded and reached out a hand to release the lantern’s lever. The glass globe moved into place and securely sealed the kindling flame. “Frequent visitors?” he asked with a doubtful hum. “This is… disturbingly convenient.”

H shrugged his shoulders indifferently and headed to the water tower past the makeshift wooden headstones. “I mean, if you wanna bury someone in secret… No big deal, Pete told me where he stashed the lamp. Didn’t you ask for more light, anyway?”

It did not sound exceedingly convincing. Arcade trailed behind him and stopped short of the wrecked fence by the tower. The lantern shed pleasant warm light on a large ‘KEEP OUT’ sign near the hilltop edge. Further down the hill laid deathclaw lands, all the way to the glowing high-rises of New Vegas.

“Looks pretty from the distance, doesn’t it?” H asked. “Less so from down there…”

Arcade nodded. The Strip had been immensely attractive for people dreaming of becoming a part of its preserved grandeur. The facade was attractive but he never understood the allure of void beauty so he turned away and looked around the cemetery instead.

It was surprisingly well-kept for a generic graveyard on the edge of nowhere. Some of the graves were enclosed with fences but most were just tilted headstones strewn all over the cemetery amidst barren shrubs.

He took the lantern from H’s hand and wandered off, studying the messy inscriptions. Arcade would not know the names - much of it was indecipherable in the dim light anyway - but it satisfied his curiosity and felt like an appropriate way to honor the past. Tempus fugit. The past faded away faster than a tumbleweed rolled about the wasteland but he did not feel like being a disrespectful trespasser.

He found his neglected company sitting next to an open grave and carelessly dangling his feet in its hollow. There was a large pile of dirt splayed nearby but it did not strike Arcade as recent.

He put the lantern down and settled next to it on the edge. “Is this one vacant?”

“Yeah, it’s been dug up. Wouldn’t let some wanker violate our privacy, would I?” H passed him a bottle of Sarsaparilla. “Halve it, I’ll mix the whiskey in. It’s about all the chemistry I know so don’t be too eager.”

“When you invited me for a late night drink I was not picturing an exhumed grave at a remote boneyard.” Arcade chuckled and obediently cleared some space for the liquor. “The next thing we know you will be guiding me through the three realms of the dead just like Virgil guided Dante... That’s why I… uh, that’s actually not important.”

“Of the dead?” H poured whiskey in with a steady hand and managed to keep it tidy. “You mean like hell?..”

Warm Sarsaparilla mixed with cheap Pre-War whiskey tasted a tad better than one would imagine warm Brahmin piss to taste. They both winced.

“Ugh, cheers.” H gently clinked the neck of his bottle against Arcade’s and looked up at him with an expressive harrumph. “Look, I know you’re real into ancient stuff I won’t fully get, or get at all. But if you find it exciting it’s worth a shot, okay? I’m not gonna tell anyone you’re secretly funny, promise.”

“Well, you asked.” Arcade barely held back a smile. “Yes, I do mean Christian hell, but an expanded, highly elaborate version of it. Remember I mentioned the Roman influence on the world literature? This is one of the finest examples. The ‘Divine Comedy’ is a poem, and one of the greatest literary works of its time. It was written about a thousand years ago or so by an Italian poet Dante. A passionate admirer of Virgil, in the story he meets his spirit and is guided by him through the realms of the underworld, learning about its structure and horrors along the way. Now, the translation was rather pompous and like the majority of medieval poems far from light reading. I have forgotten a lot and may misquote it so please do not consider my words the absolute truth.”

“Less warnings, doc, more explanations. Guided through the underworld, like Dante dies and takes a trip through some sort of an afterlife?” H tucked a leg under him and propped his chin on a fist. “And Virgil’s been dead for centuries so he knows the way?”

“Precisely. As you know, hell is supposed to be about eternal damnation for the sinful. What Dante says is that they are being divided according to their sins and left to suffer in different conditions: rivers of blood, frozen lakes, flaming tombs… you name it.” He tried to remember more details but as much as the circles of hell excited him about ten years ago as few actual facts he brought along through the years. “It is incredibly thought-through and corresponding with views and knowledge of the era. Really impressive.”

“You read it back in California?” H asked. “While you were with the Followers there?”

“Yes. And I have been with the Followers for a very long time now. You can say that I joined for medical knowledge and stayed for the libraries.” Arcade let out a snort. “I am not a type for mythology’s exuberant reverie. I enjoy realistic plotlines and the gods’ arbitrariness hardly fits in. Myths are an integral part of most ancient writings, however, Virgil’s poems included, so I had to endure. The ‘Divine Comedy’ was written in Italian but it largely drew upon Latin literature in every way… hardly a surprise.”

He took a large gulp of Brahmin Sarsaparilla and let out a groan. “Ugh… promise to get us something less virulent next time?..“

“Promise.” H laughed. “So, they set out on a journey…”

Arcade focussed on visual patterns and tried his best to outline the nine circles and whatever details he remembered. He had long forgotten most of the quotes he used to know by heart and was sure that he substantially distorted the story but gradually stopped caring after the first bottle. H was the most impressed by the imprisoned giants and almost laughed his head off about a bunch of famous poets comfortably chilling in Limbo.

He mixed another round in the emptied bottles and held his up for a clink. “That’s one hell of a trip.” He snickered and outright burst out laughing when Arcade gave him an ironic look. “I am great at puns, ‘Cade. Great!”

“Blessed are the ignorant.” He managed to keep his countenance and H nudged him in the shoulder with a loud huff. “I remain unconvinced. It was too predictable.”

“Predictable my ass.” The courier flopped down into the grave and leaned his back against its narrow side. “Wait, didn’t you say there were three lands? Of the dead?”

Arcade nodded and leisurely unbuttoned his shirt sleeves to pull them up. “Yes. The third one was heaven. Dante’s late… whoever… some beloved woman of his guided him through it. There were less horrors and more Christianity, besides Virgil had to return to hell so I quickly lost interest. It contained a lot of Latin quotes from the Bible… Move over, my back aches.”

It was warm enough at nights as it were. Almost half the bottle of whiskey did its part: he got hot, easily amused and completely nonchalant about others’ personal space. H reluctantly moved aside and made enough room to settle down across the grave from him.

“No offence but it’s a single burial pit.” He informed jokingly and grabbed his drink from the edge. “Plus, my buttocks got more rights to it.”

“They will have to share.” Arcade shrugged and took another sip from the barely touched bottle. Surprisingly, it went down more smoothly. He considered the reasons. Either he got used to the foul tang or his taste buds were starting to mortify. Both options were quite unsettling. “Now, you did not lure me here to do all the talking. Don’t you have fascinating Mojave stories to share?”

H pensively rubbed his forehead for a long moment and beamed. “I sent some ghouls into space!” he blurted out with a laugh. “Holy crap, completely forgot to tell you with all the other stuff coming down.”

Arcade stared at him in confusion. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I’m following.”

“Remember that REPCONN place near Novac? Where all the ferals came from?” H waited for him to nod and sat up with a satisfied grin. “Everyone got fed up with them so we went there with Boone, the night guard guy, and a bunch of H-One soldiers, right after I left the last time. There was a whole pack of glowy ones hanging about the entrance and quite a few real ugly corpses, ugh, they were, like, dead for some time... Super mutants, but there were ghouls too. Turned out some ghoul cult found three working rockets in the facility, almost ready for launch. They were very religious folks, believed they were destined to take a flight and called it a great voyage or something. There was a human guy, a scientist, helping them. He thought he was a ghoul, though. Don’t ask.”

He started tapping on his bottle lightly and looked up at the moon. “So, the cult was gonna leave and bring the rest of the ferals along if only we helped them find the fuel. They weren’t ferals, hella weird but, like… we wouldn’t kill them. Helping them wasn’t the best idea probably but we were sure that shit wouldn’t work. Oh yeah, and they were led by that glowy guy? He sounded super freaky. You’d never guess what his name was. Wait for it. Jason Bright.”

“What a coincidence.” Arcade let out a sceptical snort.

“Disbelieve all you want.” H grinned at him and paused to take a sip. “Didn’t even make a pun, just asked him if he was joking and he went on about it being his original Pre-War name, blah blah… I’m no good with pastors. You’d surely hate the man too, huh. So they helped us clear the place and we, um, needed to find some rocket fuel. This gang of Jason’s, they all used plasma rifles, in bad shape but firing. It got me thinking, like, REPCONN was gonna use plasma to fuel their rockets, right?.. And then, remember my Pip-boy going nuts in Cliff’s store each time? He’s sitting on a full storage of REPCONN toy rockets, got it along with Dinky. You see where I’m getting at?”

It was fairly obvious given what they had seen months ago in the museum - REPCONN did not give off an impression of being scared of a little radiation, or a lot of radiation for that matter - but it appeared improbable nonetheless.

“They didn’t pour actual rocket fuel into souvenirs,” Arcade muttered.

“Guess again. Not only did they do exactly that but the stuff from Dinky alone was enough to fill three freakin’ space rockets. Wild times.” H gave him a squinted look and grinned even wider. “You still don’t believe me, do you?”

It would have been unfair to doubt him at that point. The courier had never been a type to make stories up on a whim just to impress the company. But his grin looked suspiciously impish in the dim light of the lantern and the story sounded nothing short of Pre-War science fiction. Or rather, fiction with barely a sprinkle of science.

Arcade unabashedly shook his head with a chuckle. “Not a jot,“ he admitted. “But I am listening.”

H did not look disappointed. He curiously cocked his head to the side, studied him for a disturbingly long moment and casually sat back, stretching his leg along the grave wall. It slid in the free space next to Arcade, far enough not to hinder his comfort.

“Okay, we can work with that,” H acceded finally. “Ask around Novac for eyewitnesses if you wanna. There was a ghoul, Harland, helping us move the stock. A much nicer fella than those cultist friends of his, if you ask me... We, huh, we kinda thought they’d just squeeze into those rockets and when nothing happens we’d deal with the ferals and part ways as buddies. I mean, it’s been two centuries, right?.. Plus, their science guy was totally nuts.” He tapped a finger on his temple expressively. “No idea how Jason lured the ferals in there. I figured, the less you know... Bugging out when the rockets were ready felt like a wise idea in case it all blew up. Imagine our faces when the hatch opened and those smoke-farting fuckers blasted off smooth as… as… well, it was reasonably smooth, okay?”

Arcade tried to imagine three rockets simultaneously leaving their silos. His knowledge of the science behind the launching sequences was purely conceptual and rather rudimentary. The Followers were not known for firing missiles, let alone space rockets. It must have been truly remarkable, providing they flew upward.

“Did they fall?..” he asked a little too dejectedly.

H shot a quick glance at him and shook his head. “Didn’t fall in the Mojave, that’s for sure but, uh, I’d rather think I sent some ghouls into space than to certain death.”

“To science, then.” Arcade held his drink up. “Even if it forgets us both.”

“Huh. Maybe it should also keep some notes.” H snorted waggishly to the soft clink of their bottles and knocked his fingertips on the darkened Pip-boy screen.

He was very diligent at maintaining the journal. It was probably the only other thing that he did at every long stop no matter the circumstances apart from cleaning his rifle, even though Arcade could not help but notice that using the integrated keyboard was problematic. The Pip-boys’ primitive input system was not designed for frequent use, before the War they were most likely supposed to be coupled with a personal terminal.

H did not own a terminal and had been making the best of technology at hand. Arcade, on the contrary, could not stand the monotonous humdrum and rapidly started losing his patience even if his company was as much as sitting next to him while repeatedly tapping on the screen for a gazillion times just to write down a sentence.

Arcade never meant to pry, and frankly speaking was not very interested in the reasons to begin with, so he had been keeping the questions to himself up until whiskey went straight to his head.

“Why care about all that so much?” He pointed at the Pip-boy.

H nervously covered the screen with a hand. It was reflexive and way too hasty so when he belatedly tried to conceal the gesture with a tug on the jacket sleeve it was rather obvious to both of them that he failed.

“It’s not a friendly drink talk, really,” he said guiltily. ”I can tell you some other time.”

He looked away and started tapping on his bottle again, anxiously this time. Arcade reached out a hand and gave a leather pad on his knee a careful tug.

“I was just curious. Let’s forget about it, alright?” he suggested.

H turned to him with a sad laugh. “Yeah… that’s a good one… Uh, I’m… Listen, you won’t like it, ‘Cade. But I’m thinking, maybe you should know after all, on the off chance I short circuit again or something. I’m… err, where to start…” He trailed off and took a large gulp from his almost empty bottle.

Arcade felt as though he had accidentally piqued a far too personal matter. He never intended to hit so close to home, or rather hit at all. The secrets he kept were enough to deal with, the secrets they spilled out would needlessly complicate things. It had been working well enough as it were.

But H was the closest thing he had to a friend and he looked upset, and Arcade surely cared enough to hear him out.

They were silent for a long time. The silence felt heavy laid to rest between them in the shallow wasteland grave, no kin to the usual comfortable lack of idle chatter. H was staring at the lantern, seemingly unconscious of the light that made every emotion on his face vulnerably evident.

“I forgot stuff,” he uttered after a while and turned to Arcade. “A lot of stuff. All of it, pretty much. I’m afraid I’ll forget again so I take notes, to read if that happens. Doc Mitchell used to say it may come back eventually, Alex said it probably wouldn’t. Feel free to voice your medical opinion any time, huh… Now, the story is long and messy, and not important. I got shot in the head for a thing I was delivering to Mr. House and hit my noggin hard on some rock. You know me. First real unlucky, then real lucky, sometimes a jumble.”

There was a small pause. “A Securitron was tailing me the whole time so I didn’t bleed out when I was supposed to. Doc patched me up. Eventually I found the guy who shot me, shot him back and finally delivered the package. We met shortly after. You’ve gotten to know me since and frankly I don’t think my history of bleeding all over a desert graveyard adds much to the character. It’s not even a painful subject, it’s just… I’m rather boozed up. And haven’t exactly been roaming around the Mojave telling tales about this. No one gives a shit so please make sure you don’t stand out.”

H cracked a disarming smile with a wink and visibly relaxed when Arcade did not hesitate to return it. The story only appeared shocking. He caught glimpses of it before - odd comments around Goodsprings, rare remarks that he used to write off as inaccurate phrasing, the way H touched his scarred temple from time to time, the way he came off outgoing and rather reserved about his past at the same time.

All the peculiarities that Arcade could not properly put a finger on before were starting to make an impressive amount of sense. Cura personalis, care for the whole person. If anything, as a doctor.

“When did it happen?” he asked. Asking ‘where’ seemed needless; the pit they had been lounging in felt like a flaming tomb.

“Sometime in October. But I’d mostly been developing bed sores till December so it doesn’t count.” H shrugged and raised both eyebrows mockingly. “Relax, ‘Cade. It’s only been mine for like twenty minutes.”

“I hate feeling uninvited. Next time start with the grim backstory right away.” Arcade pointed an accusatory finger at him. “I would say I was sorry but I am by far more impressed.”

He grabbed the edge of the grave with both hands and stood up as steadily as he could muster. The alcohol per se would not be enough to get either of them off their feet but combined with accumulative exhaustion from the past several days it felt as if every soft tissue of his body had transformed into ooze and every bone - into rubber.

H threw back his head and looked up at him with a bewildered smile. “Uh, with my admirable survivability?..” he asked after a confused pause.

Arcade nudged him in the shin with a boot toe and offered a hand to help him up. “No, but feel free to think so if it brings you any consolation... Let’s go, I’m not sleeping here.”

They gathered the empty bottles and stumbled down the hill in the failing light of the lantern that H had secured on one of Eddie’s protracting metal parts. The road to the shack was not long but hurrying could have easily resulted in a number of fractured bones only some of which Arcade would be able to name by heart with absolute certainty, let alone apply a splint properly, so they cautiously kept it slow.

H dropped the bottles on the ground at the barred door and extinguished the lantern. The same murk ravenously swallowed everything around them once more; only the moon lit up bright in the tattered clouds.

Arcade tried to think of a supportive and friendly thing to say but his mind was blank. He decided to go with truth. “Amnesia resulting from a brute force trauma after a harrowing experience in the past is unlikely to go away. But your new memories are safe unless you crack your skull open.”

“Good,” H said plainly. His hand fumbled about in the dark and gave Arcade’s wrist a gentle squeeze. “I’ve grown rather fond of them.”

They headed back to New Vegas late in the morning as soon as the severe case of Brahmin Sarsaparilla hangover eased up a little. It was sunny and warm, and almost nothing worth mentioning tried to kill them along the way.

 

[art by voidvcat <3](https://www.artstation.com/voidvcat)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks everyone for reading and leaving kudos, I appreciate every single one of them and I am very glad you enjoy my story. 
> 
> And thanks to voidvcat specifically, both for encouraging me and creating the most breathtaking illustration <3 You're a wonderful artist and amazing friend, it is an honor knowing you and working with you. Much love!


	9. VII

 

··−· ·· ·− − ·−·· ··− −··−

 

Arcade laid his hands on the new microscope right after their return to Freeside. It was large and bulky, twice as powerful as the one that they had been sharing with Julie thus far. He used it to study all the preserved samples he had stored all over again in case he had previously missed some interesting mutation in the tissue.

It felt nice to see something clearly for a change.

A familiar voice intruded into his work while Arcade was scrutinizing a wafer-thin slice of mole rat tongue for the sixth time in a row. The episode was odd for several reasons but first of all because H had embarked on a journey to the south less than four days ago, so hearing him yell at someone in the old fort was highly unexpected.

His walkie talkie came alive and the guard called April Martimer over to the gate. Arcade had heard the name before. She was a scientist that came by not long ago asking about the courier travelling with an eyebot.

If the squabble outside was any indication, she finally got to ask her questions in person.

By the time Arcade had carefully packed the mole rat tongue into a container and left his tent, the scene was almost over. April turned out to be a pleasant-looking middle-aged woman. Dark skin, neat haircut, an excessive amount of idealism - a common flaw in the majority of the Followers.

“Listen to reason,” she was saying somewhat disapprovingly. “The data stored in this robot may be used for the greater good. It won’t trouble you in any way to leave it with us for a few days. We will extract the data, upgrade the frame and return it to you intact. I am positively sure that we can improve its algorithms as well.”

“There’s plenty of ways to say hello.” H pointed a finger at Eddie. “Hacking into my robot isn’t a good one.”

Arcade barely stifled an understanding ‘oh’. The episode at Novac scrapyard was months ago and the Brotherhood of Steel had been keeping a low profile ever since. Finding out that a member of another faction was hunting his eyebot would have been enough for H to drop everything he was doing and come seeking answers.

“Is there… Is there a way to keep him safe?” he asked a little too hopefully. “Can you do it?..”

April shook her head sharply. “None that I could think of, I’m afraid... What I did was merely use its frequency to convey a message. Intercepting communications from the Brotherhood of Steel is a friendly favor on the side.”

H let out a disappointed sigh. “Well, find me if you come up with a way. Don’t hack. Just find me.”

“If my assumptions are correct, this data can help us a lot,” April insisted. Understandably so, she looked rather surprised than resentful that someone could value a robot’s protection over the aforementioned greater good. 

“Yeah, sorry about that.”

Passing by, she shot a curious glance at Arcade but apparently did not consider him a possible ally in battling the courier’s mulish obstinacy. He waited until she was out of earshot and came closer.

“Now that’s what I call a pleasant company.” H grinned and squinted at him against the blinding sunlight. Late spring golden sunset generously spilled a whole palette of warm bronze on every surface and made his face look almost well-rested.

Arcade chuckled. “I suppose so.” He reached out a hand and touched Eddie on the weathered Pre-War license plate welded on its side. The letters spelled ‘ED-E’, that likely was how the eyebot got its name. “You’re very sought after, aren’t you, tin can?..”

Eddie let out a short beep. H shifted on his feet nervously and thrust both hands in his jacket pockets. “Right… Hope the NCR doesn’t join the fun. Better the Legion, ‘least I can take those out on sight.”

“Sure. Caesar, a far famed dedicated enthusiast of technological advancement.”

H snorted and took his backpack off with a tired sigh. “Well, since I’m trapped here for the night, wanna eat? Just gotta drop this off somewhere...“

“What do you have in mind? Come.” Arcade beckoned him to follow and headed back to the tent. “Julie is visiting the new safehouse, you can stay here for today. You are in luck that I am willing to share, everything else has been full since April came around.”

“Thanks.” H nodded and tossed his stuff on the upper bunk. “I’ll pay up in snacks. They’ve been harvesting a shitload of fresh fruit in the Westside lately, I say we take advantage before someone shuts that outfit down. Gotta hurry up, though, the Co-op closes at eight.”

“Weren’t they having trouble getting water for the farms?..” Arcade voiced his confusion when they set out through the open gate. “I passed through there a while ago with another Follower.”

“Nah, not anymore,” H replied with a frown and grumpily rubbed his forehead under the tilted cap vizor. “They’ve gotten well-fixed.”

Arcade shot a surprised glance at him. “Why do you sound disapproving?..”

It was hard to see how any kind of independence around the outer New Vegas could be considered disadvantageous. Judging from his superficial knowledge, the situation in the Westside was just as grim as everywhere else. The whole city had been struggling long before the Followers came around, and even then all their effort had mostly been in vain due to various reasons.

H gave him a guilty smile, mumbled something about ‘a nasty story’ and uncomfortably shrugged the question off. Arcade did not think it worth exasperating.

The Westside neighbourhood looked like an actual labyrinth of makeshift protective walls and shut off streets leading to multiple dead ends. It used to be much smaller when the first ring of walls was constructed; since then the militia sentries had been watching over the streets both in- and outside the gates.

Arcade knew, mostly from the letters, that Judah also was a part of local militia. The captain was very proud of his role as a security officer and never missed an opportunity for a signature dad joke on the topic. It seemed that all the residents unavoidably became either farmers or guards, or both, with only a few notable exceptions.

H was not exaggerating: the things around the Westside were different. The neighbourhood still appeared poor and run-down, except it was not the case anymore. They passed about a dozen different garden beds and a pack Brahmin loaded with several large gourds of water on the way to the Co-op. The creature was guided, and guarded, only by a boy of about ten years old.

In comparison to the dire state of things in Freeside such exuberance was a welcome sight. Arcade marvelled at the thriving crops even though he could not help but notice that such a rapid change out of thin air was indeed suspicious. The western area had always been secluded but it was not located in another dimension from the rest of the New Vegas.

Freeside was close by, and still impoverished to the point that the only reason why no one had been slaughtered for meat yet was the help from the Kings. Even the NCR sharecropper farms were going through difficult times despite Mr. House’s support. In other words, the neighbourhood alone was prospering, much to anyone’s misgiving.

Arcade made sure to keep the questions to himself until they returned to the outer Westside with two cardboards of cut-up fruit. There was a rather pleasant, albeit rusting playground featuring a pair of derelict Pre-War swings and several picnic tables not far from the Thorn entrance.

H offloaded the cardboards on the farthest table and flopped down on a bench next to it with an exhausted sigh. “Crap… Can’t feel my legs.”

“Do tell me if you experience any facial numbness.” Arcade took his coat off, carefully folded it in two and seated himself across the table. “I have no medicine on me but I would rather know the causa mortis.”

“Fine.” H passed him a plastic fork with a chippy prong.

The fruit salad consisted of a whole pile of fleshy banana yucca lumps, several spoons of grated barrel cacti fruit and some juicy red apple. Most of that was being grown by the local farmers all around the Westside. There were no apple trees in the vicinity so the apples they saw in the Co-op had probably been traded off the caravans for the excess of the Westside’s own harvest. The existence of such excess alone was either a miracle or a red flag.

Arcade had been toying with the last yucca piece for about five minutes before he finally decided to satisfy his curiosity.

“Alright, what happened here?” he asked bluntly and pointed at the gates with his fork. “The place looks like an oasis, considering the surroundings.”

H flattened his cheek on a palm tiredly and hummed in response, idly scraping flaked green paint from the table top. “Sorry, ‘Cade. Promised to keep it secret.”

“Is that so?.. Covering up the others’ mess sub rosa is not entirely your style.” Arcade raised a brow and gave the neighbourhood walls a contemplative look.

He thought about the exuberant well-tended crops, the fresh salad they managed to lay their hands on even at the end of the day, the loaded Brahmin transporting an impressive water supply in the open unescorted... People in Freeside would murder each other for drugs, caps and well-purified water. Something did not add up.

“It’s the water,” Arcade stated the obvious on reflection. “The Westside has a lot of water now, more than enough to supply everyone. Hm… but there are only two... oh.”

H held his tongue and neither proved nor disproved his speculation. He stopped scraping the paint, however, and propped a heel on the bench to rest his arms on the knee. Arcade met his gaze but it was difficult to interpret clearly.

“I see,” he said and finished the yucca piece. “Actually, no, I don’t see. How did they manage to pull this scheme without anyone noticing? There are definitely traders visiting, and Freeside is just around the corner. Covertly redirecting the water supply is one thing but diverting it completely?.. Surely the NCR would notice. Besides, skilled engineers are rare in these parts.”

“I really shouldn’t tell you.” H shook his head with an unreadable expression. “It’s not a problem anymore. I’m just… I’m not buying that ‘justify the means’ crap. Some means aren’t okay. You’re either a savior or a killer.”

“If the Westside truly became independent - from the NCR, from Mr. House… Look,” Arcade said quietly and gestured at the city view before them. “This is New Vegas.”

The pristine colossus of Lucky 38 was towering in all its alabaster magnificence above the crumbling ruins of Pre-War apartment complexes too run-down and dangerous to settle in even for the most desperate.

“Yes,” H echoed and stared at their empty cardboards.

He did not elaborate so Arcade let out a sigh and continued. “I do not argue that it is unfair that the Westside is using the bulk of the city water to their advantage. But being reserved is the only way to protect oneself from being robbed these days. Anything is better than ineliminable dependence on the goodwill of those in power. I am more surprised, and to be honest rather concerned, that no one has figured this scheme out yet.”

H looked up at him with a proud grin. “You did.”

“And no one else, otherwise all this would have been in shambles. No one who would want to get the water back, like the NCR... But I do hope that what we are seeing here today is eventually going to develop into something more permanent.” Arcade pointed at the casino tower meaningfully. “And a little more fair.”

It was naive to deny that he, all too often, sounded overly idealistic. It was likely even more naive to hope that the situation in New Vegas could change. But he was not with the Followers for the matching outfits alone and would never forgive himself if he sat the dark times out. It was the main reason why he decided to come to Nevada after three years of war in the first place.

New Vegas needed help. Arcade could either do something - something more than his research, more than sightseeing and helping strangers - or pack his stuff in an obnoxiously small box and take a trip back to the Boneyard.

He stood up abruptly and almost toppled, stepping over the bench. He was unsure of where exactly he was going, could have easily been straight to California. The sun was almost down but even the perfect peachy shades its light was throwing over the ruins did not conceal their state.

“Wait.” H reached out and caught him by the arm. Arcade felt the scratch of the Pip-boy cable against his bare forearm and a careful tug on his rolled up sleeve at the elbow. “You’re right... I’m gonna stay for a while. I mean, the war’s everyone’s priority and all but it’s not like I can’t spare some time for the people around here. There’s always a thing or two.”

“I am not trying to make you stay.”

H chuckled and stretched his back with an irksomely widening grin. “Right, that’s one way to excuse your so-so argumentation.”

Arcade did not dignify that with a retort and silently watched him guide Eddie through a large hole in the fence. “Where are you going?” He shuffled his coat back on and grabbed the cardboards from the table before hurrying to catch up with them.

“Help the locals, duh,” H slurred over his shoulder. “You coming?”

“I… yes, yes I am.” Arcade looked away to furtively hide his smile and nearly stumbled on a battered kerb on the road to Freeside.

New Vegas never quietened for the night, only became considerably more perilous after sundown. Thankfully, it was nothing that words - or a well-calibrated tesla cannon, for that matter - could not solve.

They spent about four hours circling around the neighbourhood but the result was worth the effort. Their help was unexpected, very much so at the end of the day, but it was needed and reasonably appreciated. However, even with the Followers’ humble abode right around the corner and Arcade’s distinctive outfit few people would instantly believe their candid offer to lend a hand.

“Maybe we should get you a coat as well,” he jested along the way.

H snorted. “Yeah, like I could pass for a Follower.”

“As long as you are helping people?..” Arcade looked him over. “Sure you could.”

The Followers of Apocalypse had never been simply ‘an idea’, first and foremost because the original cohort needed medicine to tend to people, and equipment to do research, and books to educate new members. But it was an idea in a large part, and H got it well enough to deserve a dusty lab coat.

The rifle would be fundamentally out of character, however.

By the time they crawled back to the old fort and Arcade collapsed on his bunk it was well past his bedtime. He clumsily pushed the brim of his glasses up, took them off with a weary yawn and stretched out to habitually settle them on the edge of Julie’s chair. It was the closest piece of furniture that she was unlikely to topple on the way to the restroom.

H finished rummaging about noisily in the dark, insolently pushed his legs to the side and sat down on the farthest side of his mattress.

“I am having second thoughts about this accommodation,” Arcade muttered and splayed an arm over his face. “What are you doing?..”

“It’s only funny if you guess,” H replied jocosely in the dark. Two dull thumps of his heavy boots followed.

The bunk creaked under his weight as he settled in on the upper mattress. It was the third time in Arcade’s memory when they actually fell off their feet at the same time but he would not know on what sheer strength of will H managed to drag himself through the evening. He felt a little guilty for encouraging him to stay up but quickly made light of the thought.

Eddie was beeping somewhere close by, right on the other side of the dense fabric of the tent where he would not pose a threat to any fragile laboratory equipment.

As opposed to its first days in the fort, the sound was strangely somnolent and it lulled Arcade to sleep faster than he was able to fully formulate his concern.

Both the eyebot and its master were gone by the time he woke up, along with the rest of H’s things. Julie had not returned yet and all the fellow Followers were mostly idling about their projects in her absence.

Arcade decided not to stand out and leisurely tested a couple of semi-scientific ways of assaying the mole rat tongue before heading for the Westside. He would not stop thinking about it, albeit for the reason other than their water supply, so he decided to combine the useful with the pleasing and visit Judah.

It was never hard to find the old man since there was only one spot where he usually stayed during the day providing that he was not guarding the perimeter or tending to the crops: the local pawn shop.

As expected, Judah was delightedly chilling in the sun next to a chess table. Almost half the figures from the board were missing and had been replaced with painted pebble. It was hard to play like that at first but since New Vegas’ symbol had never been a chessboard finding the full package would have been close to impossible.

“Hello, Arcade.” Judah slightly raised the vizor of his sun-bleached, once bright-red cap and gestured at the vacant chair next to him. “Care to join me?”

“It is good to see you, captain.” Arcade sat down with a sincere smile and stretched out his legs, squinting at the sun deprecatingly. “Here goes the deadly laser…” For a relatively fair-skinned person he surely was arrogant to walk around without a hat.

“Now, now. A little sunshine never killed anybody.” Judah gave his gray moustache a twirl.

Arcade smirked. “Actually, it did, a whole lot of people. It is called heat apoplexy, a potentially fatal condition…”

“Maybe we should’ve gotten you a bucket hat instead of a schoolbook for that birthday.” The old man chuckled and laughingly waved a hand at him. “By the way, I spotted a suspiciously looking doctor by the Co-op yesterday alongside the oddest bunch. Making some new friends, are you?”

“Yeah…” Arcade met his ever attentive gaze and let out a hesitant half-smile. “You could say that.”

“Tell you what, when Whitman first mentioned an eyebot I decided it was your inside joke or whatnot. Can’t be that a civilian reprogrammed the thing just right,” Judah furrowed his brows. “So much for advanced E tech.”

“The better question is would you believe me if I said he didn’t?..” Arcade shook his head with a sigh. “Sometimes he makes me think that luck is indeed a higher power.”

“Wait, are you saying it’s not programmed?..”

“It is. Well, just factory settings and a basic set of commands, I presume. I would not be one to know much about the eyebots either. It is a prototype from somewhere on the eastern coast, it was dispatched to Navarro years ago but never reached it. H found it and turned it on.” Arcade summed the story up. “I nearly had a stroke when he told me.”

Judah stared at him appraisingly for a spell and dissolved into hearty laughter. “A resourceful one, then!.. Ha! Eat it, E scientists, ha ha… huh…” It was such an unfeigned display of joy that Arcade could not hold back a chuckle.

“Uh, this isn’t safe, though,” the old man said on a more serious note when he finally managed to regain his countenance. “One wrong command, and poof - you’re both radioactive ash... You know what, ask Moreno, he might remember a thing or two. If he pulls his head out of his ass, that is.”

“How is he?” Arcade asked curiously. He had not written Orion for about a month, mainly because he had not yet recuperated his spirit since the last visit. Moreno was not a bad person… not entirely, in any case, but he was a difficult man to interact with, even in his younger years, according to the family.

“Saw him a couple of weeks ago, he was joyfully rattling about how bad the NCR farms have been doing lately. The usual, if you ask me.” Judah shrugged. “Pray that the old crock doesn’t ever change, Arcade, I’m pretty sure he's the planet’s axis.”

They laughed and finally got down to chess. Playing pebble was frustrating since Arcade kept forgetting what the sloppily painted symbols meant and he had to pick the stones up to discern one line from the other. But he enjoyed chess greatly, mainly because a good game required a significant amount of brainwork from the players.

Judah was way better at it than him. He won two rounds out of three and sat back with a satisfied smile; half of it was concealed by his moustache. “Good, very good. Way better than the folks here can do. Not for lack of practice, rest assured.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment... Oh, I almost forgot, I have another letter for Daisy.” Arcade passed a puff envelope over. “Are you certain you do not mind sending these?..”

“Of course not.” Judah waved his concern away. “Your spy games give me a good reason to drop a line and check up on Whitman.”

He never wrote many letters. As the ex-captain of the ‘Devil's Brigade’, he used to be responsible for the people who served with him. As a member of the Remnants family, he stayed loyal to them in every sense and always made sure that they felt welcome in the group. Even so, being a commanding officer meant a great deal in a paramilitary organization like the Enclave. Judah had always been in a superior position and thirty years in retirement had not changed that.

Arcade looked up to him since he was a child and despite them never being very close or familiarly warm to each other he felt nothing less than honored that the old man considered him a company interesting enough to chat and play chess with. He realized that the whole family perceived him as their child, albeit in varying degrees, and the captain clearly had a soft spot reserved for everyone in the group but this knowledge did not help with being somewhat anxious around him.

Judah showed him to the outer gate and gave his shoulder an encouraging pat. “Do ask Moreno about the eyebot, just to be on the safe side. You’ll have time to figure out what to do with the info later. It did reach what’s left of Navarro after all.”

He waited for a firm nod and headed back to the farms while Arcade took the shortcut to Freeside, pondering over the ways to inquire Orion about the long-forgotten Enclave technology without raising a fair deal of well-warranted suspicions.

He did not consider himself to have any kind of responsibility for either the eyebot or its actions. His origin gave him no more rights for the rusty tin can than anyone else, but it did grant him knowledge. Apparently, Judah thought that it alone entitled him to decide the eyebot’s fate. Or maybe its master was the reason. The old man probably wouldn’t conceal important information from a friend, no matter if it meant lying about the source to cover up an old secret. The question remained whether Arcade would.

When he came back to the old fort, the object of his contemplation was lounging comfortably in Eddie’s oddly shaped shadow on the footworn path right across his and Julie’s tent entrance. It was, needless to say, an unconventional choice of space to sunbathe in, so Arcade assumed that the guest was probably waiting for either of them to come back. He shot a glance down and stepped over him on the way in.

“Wow. Rude,” sounded from the ground.

“You looked way too cosy to make you move.” Arcade shrugged even though H could not see it and drew the tent flap aside just enough to stay in the shadow. Several hours in the sun did not present him with any notorious symptoms of a heat stroke, thankfully, but they were more than enough for the day.

Eddie floated aside as usual at the movement; H mumbled something incoherent and sat up with a sour expression when the eyebot’s shadow shifted. The cap vizor concealed most of his face but not the obvious discontent at the merciless mid-May sunlight.

Arcade grabbed two plastic bottles from his lab table, leaned on the entrance pole and tossed one over. “Here. Stay hydrated, doctor’s orders. So, did you want something?”

“Thanks, ‘Cade.” H clumsily caught the bottle with both hands and settled cross-legged on the ground. “Actually, yeah. Wanna come to a show tomorrow evening?.. I found some new entertainers for the Tops so the manager gave me a free pass. I thought you may like to see the guys, they’re mighty fine, honest.”

To put it bluntly, visiting the Strip any time soon - or ever again, for that matter - had not been on Arcade’s agenda. The first time was quite enough to get the overall impression of touristic overindulgence and the Families’ despicable parasitism. But the invitation touched him, for lack of a better word, and he got mildly curious. He had not been to a single show since leaving California. Surely they could not all be bad in New Vegas.

“I don’t think I am dressed for the occasion,” Arcade admitted after a pause.

H visibly relaxed and gave him a heartening grin. “Nah, don’t worry, I’ll bring something. Not exactly Strip material myself, am I?” He nodded at his cut jacket sleeve. To do the outfit justice, it almost looked like a fashion statement although perhaps not the kind that would be appreciated in high places.

Arcade shifted on his feet hesitantly but surrendered to the hopeful stare. “Uh… very well. As long as we are not unwelcome.”

“We’re on the celebrity list, promise. Well, kinda... No one’s gonna stare anyways. Okay, see you later then.” H beamed, gave him back the emptied bottle and was off in a flash along with his self-portable beeping sunshade.

It was a good time to go back to research so Arcade did exactly that. He felt like someone was watching him, however, and he knew who that was but chose to disregard the unwanted attention unless it was impossible to ignore. He finished the lengthy report regarding his latest microscope findings, sorted out all the remaining notes and spent the rest of the day at the lab table checking on his samples up until Julie returned and shooed him away from the terminal to get to her own work.

April finally decided to proceed with action when he was boiling tea before bed and joined him at the hot plates with a small saucepan.

“Doctor Gannon, if I’m not mistaken?..” she asked and shook his hand firmly. “My name is April, pleased to meet you.”

“Likewise. However, if you were hoping to know more about that flying robot I’m afraid I know even less than you do,” Arcade asserted right away. It came out a bit rude but he was not in the mood for excessive pleasantries.

“On the contrary, I wanted to tell you about it.” April stayed professional and collected. It was rather admirable. “I might be wrong but I got an impression that its owner is an associate of yours. Sadly, my attempts to talk to him had met with failure but I’m not planning on giving up just yet. Extracting the information stored in the robot’s memory banks will be averagely to extremely important for our effort, and the interference from the Brotherhood of Steel, no matter how minimal, indirectly confirms my suspicion. It would be a waste if supposedly valuable data perished in the wasteland from a stray Gauss rifle shot. I have to admit that I'm… well, I am at a loss. The procedure is completely risk-free and my offer to enhance the robot’s weaponry seems more than appealing. Why the turndown?”

Arcade let out an amused smile. “I understand your confusion. This would hardly be an enigma if you had a chance to know him. H loves that robot… like a pet of sorts. Science is not his strongest suit and the robot’s military affiliation makes him uneasy. You scared him when you followed the Brotherhood’s example and transmitted the message. How did you do it, by the way? If you do not mind me asking.”

The water boiled so they proceeded with making tea and sat down at the small round table in the corner of the tent. It brought back memories of another conversation, albeit on the same topic. Arcade estimated that it must have been about five months ago. Seeing Eddie float in through the open gates for the first time seemed like a millennia ago. To think that it took him less than half a year to grow accustomed to an eyebot, of all things… Next thing you know, he would be trying on power armor.

There was no point in being worried about the Enclave information falling into hands of the Followers, mainly because Arcade was confident in his alma mater. Besides, all the Enclave data had always been heavily encrypted, including the personal correspondence. Cracking the code was not impossible but he doubted that even the Boneyard facilities would be a match for sensibly paranoid armed forces’ security.

“... my idea,” April was saying. “It was Emily Ortal’s. My speciality is weapons engineering but as you can imagine this particular area of study does not have many useful applications for the Followers here in Nevada. I was looking for a project to join so Emily told me of her radio waves surveillance system. She put it together during one of her numerous attempts to get into Mr. House’s master system, you might have heard about that. She had been monitoring accessible radio frequencies for patterns and irregularities - the majority of them are silent nowadays so she figured out quite an inventive automated recording approach. That is how I got to hear the Brotherhood’s message - well, parts of it. The radio signal around the Mojave primarily depends on whether or not the source is close to a working tower. She did not want to pursue all this in regard to her project so I took over. I know a person back in HQ to whom I can send the data once it’s extracted.”

Arcade nodded. “She must have been monitoring the robot’s frequency just in case since it was allowed to the casino… Sorry, my knowledge on this subject is hurtfully limited. If I remember correctly, you said there was no way of protecting the tin can?..” He musingly tapped his fingers on the edge of the table. “Even by jamming its signal?”

“I don’t know how the Brotherhood tracked the frequency down exactly but I think they have established a similar surveillance system. There is a mole rat hole somewhere in the desert but few rats on the surface. They would need a way to keep an eye on the NCR. Radio is just a medium, unless the pre-programmed command is activated such transmissions affect nothing but your friend’s frame of mind,” April explained. “I’m afraid we can't know more for sure but I would not recommend completely cutting off its relay features since they are inherent in this model, although I doubt that at this point even Mr. House would recognize a RobCo creation in it. The thing has to use the same basic components but that’s it. Given the Enclave history, deactivating its speakers might as well initiate some sort of an immediate self-destruct sequence.”

They fell silent. Then Arcade took his empty cup from the table and stood up. “The Brotherhood seems surprisingly uninterested in it since there has not been an armed kidnapping. Yet.”

“Must be barely worth losing a squad while following it all over the Mojave,” April inferred from what little they knew. “As long as it does not enter their territory they wouldn’t risk snatching it. This is, of course, just an assumption but it seems logical. I suppose that the only way to protect the robot from the Brotherhood would be deleting the data - I'm positive I'll be able to do that after I extract all the necessary information.”

The other possible way would have been destroying the Brotherhood altogether but given that the NCR had been struggling with the remaining bunkers for decades it was hardly an overnight solution.

Arcade thanked her for the conversation and wished her good luck with the project. The wish was sincere, much to his own surprise. In the end, she did not ask him to talk to H about the eyebot, he did not offer to do so and they parted ways well contented.


	10. VIII

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello gayness my old friend

 

··−· ·· ·− − ·−·· ··− −··−

 

The leather jacket that H brought him was a little loose in the shoulders and way too short in comparison to the usual lab coat but it fit alright. It seemed surprisingly stylish for a well worn garment with faded baggy elbows and a bunch of threads sticking out of the frayed embroidery on the back. It somehow managed to make his usual Followers outfit look more or less presentable.

H shot a glance at him from the entrance and flashed a satisfied smile. “Wow. Lookin' good. Gotta admit those Kings guys know their fashion.”

“I presume the crown on the back is the gang trademark,” Arcade muttered and straightened the lapels. “How did you persuade them?..”

“The King’s a nice guy. Helped him out a few times… no indecent stuff, don’t worry.” H tittered at the change of his expression. “They kinda think themselves protectors of Freeside but with more swag. They’ve got something cooking on this side of the gate, I promised to look into it in turn for this rig-out favor.”

He was wearing a similar-looking jacket and the usual weathered cap; his growing hair was once again sticking out from underneath it in every direction. Dirty goggles lenses above the vizor looked darkened with sand.

Arcade reached out a hand and tapped a finger on the vizor’s edge lightly. “If you accept constructive suggestions, may I point out that the hat is ruining the fancy getup a little?”

“Oh crap. Forgot about it.” H pulled the cap off embarrassedly, placed it atop the lab terminal and swiftly smoothed down his hair. “Gonna grab it later... huh, let’s go?”

The Strip was not that far from the old fort, about a quarter walk at the farthest. Soon enough they stepped through the blue gates to the southern part of Freeside. It looked markedly less miserable in the dark than broad daylight: all the multicoloured neon signs were lit up and the Strip’s lights were glowing bright against the night sky at the distance. Their gleam was sometimes visible above the city walls at nights.

The Kings’ purple ‘S’ on the guitar-shaped sign above the door was flickering every now and then. There was a group of look-alike black-haired gentlemen gathering underneath the neon guitar at the entrance. One of them waved at H as they passed by but Arcade was unsure whether the gesture was welcoming or dismissive.

Across the road two barkers were touting their respective establishments loudly underneath a pieced together ‘Freeside’ sign. Arcade knew that one of the big three around those parts was ‘Silver Rush’, a merchant company specialising in energy weapons. He had long been curious about them but never paid a visit. In the end, it was only the skill that made the weapons deadly, or so he told himself, buying energy cells for cheap off visiting caravaneers.

Besides, since they started travelling together H had been buying largely discounted ammo for both of them whenever he happened to hit Mick and Ralph’s. The only possible way to get the cells even cheaper would probably be stealing them.

The boulevard leading to the Strip entrance was long, gloomy and eerily silent as though every person coming along it was hellbound except the Securitrons guarding the Inferno wielded heavier guns. The ominous inscription above the gates said ‘Welcome to the Strip’ instead of a more classic ‘Abandon all hope’ version.

Arcade got a little nervous when they approached the gates. What if the Securitrons would not recognise H or would not let him bring a companion along?.. He did not have any documents on him and would not be one to carry thousands of caps around, which was presumably the only alternative to a valid passport.

But the gates opened and bathed them in the brightest radiance: the Strip was shining and flashing, and twinkling, and beaming, and urging every visitor to part with their riches without further delay. It was rather bustling inside - more so than one would expect from an isolated city of vice - and about half of the public were NCR soldiers.

They could pass as guards from the distance except most were totally hammered. A young woman wearing two-headed bear uniform stumbled past them gabbling that ‘Crocker could kiss her sweet republic ass’. Arcade did not even realize he was scowling until H gently tugged at his sleeve and nodded at the inner gate.

It was even more crowded further in the den of sin, naturally - a group of sober soldiers were carrying sizeable provision crates down the monorail station steps while numerous gadabout well-dressed visitors were strolling along the boulevard between the two casinos.

From what Arcade had heard, the Ultra-Luxe only allowed those wearing formal attire inside so he assumed that they were going to the other one, The Tops. Its main building was a peculiarly shaped squat construction adorned with constantly revolving neon light trimming so luminous that it hurt the eyes to look directly at it. There was a barker outside crying out invitations to the evening performance; two men in striped suits were smoking at the entrance.

The inside was the perfect match for the exterior in design, it was exceptionally eye-catching and vibrant in colour. The main thing that caught Arcade’s attention was the unexpected abundance of natural-looking potted plants in the lobby. Those might have as well been artificial, of course, but if that was the case the craftsmanship quality was astounding.

He could not stop gawking at the palms sticking out of the enormous pot behind the circular reception desk like a buffoon even though it was highly doubtful that the Chairmen would agree to give a bunch of leaves away for the sake of science.

A laid back doorman routinely asked them to surrender their weapons but they both came unarmed for a change and the floating murder machine had been left elsewhere. Arcade would not know where H had been staying lately since the old fort was fully occupied. Maybe in the Atomic Wrangler, maybe on the Strip itself. In both cases it was wise to bring along a sleeping bag rather than chafe against the greasy sheets.

The Tops foyer, on the other hand, seemed tidy and rather classy. H straightened his jacket nervously once they passed through the lobby and entered the packed out gambling hall. “Uh… that’s a lot of theater lovers,” he mumbled.

“Panem et circenses, now and always.” Arcade chuckled. He had to step aside from the stairs to let a group of posh-looking ladies in satin dresses pass by. There were more people at the doors already. “Is it always this busy?..”

“Big opening, duh.” H cracked an apologetic grin and nodded at the ceaselessly clinking slot machines and crowded playing tables. “Wanna try your luck, doc?”

Arcade let out an amused snort. “If you happen to possess a surfeit of caps to cast to the wind? Sure.” He never considered himself reckless enough for gambling - or lucky enough to win, for that matter.

“Tried blackjack once,” H told him on the way up the stairs. “Won about four hundred-ish or so?.. The new head guy spared some chips as payment. But they didn’t care to mention the rules.”

“And what about the slots?” Arcade mused jokingly. ”There’s one rule: pull the lever.”

H gave him a wink. “Yeah, you tell me where’s fun in that.”

A Chairman guarding the entrance to The Aces reluctantly let them in after checking with someone inside. The parlour was almost empty in preparation for the show except for the theater staff but it seemed quite pleasant. There was a sea of small round tables set out in front of the stage, a curved bar counter in the corner and a very long booth with bright red diner sitting on the other side. A large ‘Aces’ sign with neon playing cards was mounted on the curtain above the stage.

Arcade looked around the theater curiously. Most of the people in the parlour were clearly the performers. A man in a black cowboy hat was adjusting the microphone on stage, a group of dark-suited gents swarmed around the bar leisurely and there was, surprisingly, a ghoul sitting at one of the tables next to a well-polished guitar. All of the present company turned to the newcomers for a moment but promptly returned to their affairs.

They were greeted by an overly friendly hispanic gentleman wearing a black eyepatch who insisted on calling H ‘baby’ at least once in every sentence he uttered. It seemed particularly uncanny but Arcade had no time to consider if he cared enough to ask before the gentleman rushed on stage yelling at the cowboy hat man for toppling the mic. ‘Baby’ was clearly his habitual way of addressing people.

“Well, where do you wanna sit?” H asked when they were left to their own devices.

“You’re the sniper.” Arcade shrugged. “Choose a vantage point.”

H hummed amusedly. “Wasn’t gonna snipe anybody today but sure.”

After a short calculation they settled down at one of the round tables near the farthest right corner of the stage. It was well situated in a large group of other tables but a little to the side so the public would be unlikely to notice them while watching the performance.

Arcade idly wondered whether the theater - and the casino, for that matter - used to look a lot like its current state before the War. The parlour seemed stylish enough to suggest that the furniture in it was designed to order back in the old days. Even the chairs’ upholstery was exactly the same color, pattern and material - there was no way that those could have been scavenged around the wasteland. 

It was a shame that any single - out of four! - casino on the Strip could have easily provided for the starving people of Freeside for months, even years of more or less comfortable living without notably cutting back on their own extravagant expenses, and yet none - out of four - ever gave it a second thought.

He investigated the restrooms and decided that it would probably be in his best interest to forget about the misfortunes plaguing New Vegas for one evening before he went out of his mind over the non radioactive supply of tap water or some other despicable manifestation of auri sacra fames he was yet to stumble upon.

H timely hit the bar and came back with two bottles of Sarsaparilla and a tiny bowl of roasted pinyon nuts just as the doors opened for public and people started pouring in. Arcade watched them occupy the nearby tables; the newcomers courteously pulled chairs out for the ladies and gentlemen alike, shared drinks and chatted. All the talking morphed into background noise instantly. 

It was already getting stuffy in the crammed parlour. Arcade struggled with his jacket zipper clumsily in the rapidly dimming light. “Um, do you know the programme?..” he asked in a low voice.

“Can’t say I do,” H admitted and leaned closer when someone shushed them from the adjacent table. “But unless the guys decided to change their range since yesterday guess it’s gonna be singing, comedy and some dancing. Maybe not in that order.”

The show started as soon as the spotlights on stage lit up. The opening act was a dance led by the eyepatch gentleman and even though the choreography left much to be desired the perfect sync of the dancers’ moves was impressive. The tune turned out to be terribly catchy; very much so given that H could not possibly hold his shaking leg still.

No one was paying attention to their murmur anymore. H chuckled lightheartedly each time Arcade nudged him in the knee to hold still, keenly commented on every act and shared tremendously far-fetched tales in hushed whisper, like how he came across the cowboy guitarist on the road to the hazardous deathclaw quarries, or talked the ghoul into leaving the Atomic Wrangler, and similar anecdotes. At some point the lady sitting behind them moved her table for the umpteenth time to make more room for her ever expanding company and forced them to flush their chairs against one another.

By the end of the evening they had long gotten their bottles mixed up. There were so many patrons in the rammed theater, both seated and standing, and such useless decrepit ventilation that it was sweltering inside even with the doors wide open.

The show went on to the sounds of Pre-War jazz slightly rippling with static. Arcade could feel the excited presence next to him at every move; they bumped shoulders accidentally each time either of them reached for their bottles, or shifted in the chair, or leaned in to drop a remark. He sipped his Sarsaparilla and looked away from the stage more often than not. Pride for his work made H look younger, and happier.

When the light turned back on, they were the only ones who did not instantly leave their seats. Arcade propped an elbow on the tabletop and picked at the last pinyon nut with two fingers, still contemplating the ghoul comedy grand finale. The show was fine, more so than he expected, although he would have taken extra pleasure in the performance if they did not have to go to the Strip to attend it. Among the well-dressed residents and wide-eyed tourists they stuck out like a pair of deathclaws.

H was watching him with a timid half-smile. “Wanna go someplace else?” he asked and nodded in the general direction of the crowded bar. There was a queue next to it even though the majority of the spectators had already migrated outside.

“Yeah.” Arcade cautiously smiled back as they stood up. “A drink wouldn’t hurt.”

The evening felt alarmingly like a date. He would have been sure of it if he did not know better. H was a fairly simple person and they knew each other relatively well, as one’s amnesia and the other’s Enclave past secrets permitted - the man would never make him go to the Strip unless he genuinely wanted to show off the stage talents he gathered. He had been portraying a mixture of proud and a little anxious the whole evening but on the way from the casino he seemed just… anxious.

Arcade had been on way too many dates in his life. Most of his men were - there was no point in pretending otherwise - by far more sophisticated and a lot less famous. If H asked him out he would not turn down the invitation since the company was enjoyable. Even so, he was glad it was not the case, at least not explicitly. His despairingly rich history of singlehandedly initiated break-ups suggested he was not very good at growing close.

Their choice of a drinking establishment for the night was particularly unusual. All things considered, it was a rather predictable turn of events although Arcade was unaware it was on the list of options. As they passed through the gate on the way back to the northern Strip exit, H made a sudden turn and led the way to the entrance of Lucky 38.

“Wasn’t that one off limits to the public?..” Arcade voiced his concern. “And guarded by deadly missile-wielding Securitrons?”

“Nah, not for us. Mr. House allowed me to bring visitors anywhere except the penthouse. I figured, we don’t wanna hang out in the crowd again, do we?.. Sure won’t be a problem up there. Look, I know you hate it on the Strip... just a one-time thing. Won’t find a better spot for a Pre-War cocktail, huh. What do you say?” H gave him a wink and made a welcoming gesture past the idle Securitron at the open door.

Arcade shook his head amazedly but entered the silent casino. It did not look deserted, more as if the place got stuck in time along with its spotless Pre-War interior: elegantly decorated with various Old World relics and completely devoid of any trace of human presence other than the visitors’ blurry reflections in polished panels.

The elevator took them to a circular lounge almost at the top of the tower - H had mentioned a penthouse, and judging from the limited view through the dirty windows Arcade doubted there was anything else above Lucky’s protracting blades visible from all over the Mojave. The bar seemed stuck in time just the same - even the orderly rows of assorted bottles on the ceiling-high shelves appeared untouched.

“How… uh, how do you like it?” H asked from behind his shoulder.

“Well... This certainly is the fanciest spot in town,” Arcade teased. “My, my. I would not take you for a bon vivant.”

H pulled a long face at him. “Very funny. Okay, don’t cut out while I’m gone. Gotta go ask Jane if she knows any cocktails. She’s one of the Securitrons.” He wavered at the entrance for a moment and swiftly stepped back into the elevator.

Arcade straightened his jacket awkwardly as though Mr. House himself was watching him through some sort of an advanced surveillance system - truth be told, it was not unlikely - and approached the picture windows. It was dark outside so he looked upon the vast murk of the desert plains spread for miles and miles in every direction around the city. Alas, even the murk itself was barely visible through several layers of grimy glass.

“Ad altiora tendo,” Arcade whispered to his own obscure reflection as it eagerly returned his faint smile.

He shot a series of curious glances around the lounge but begrudgingly decided to wait on the nearest sofa. H did tell him they were both welcome guests and he probably meant it but wandering about the casino unaccompanied - especially if Mr. House was indeed watching - seemed ill-advised all the same.

His company returned soon enough along with a regular model Securitron featuring an unusual female portrait on the main screen. She was talkative, way too talkative to Arcade’s taste, so he left H to deal with her and finally circled the lounge, inquisitively studying the old posters of some gaming event of the distant past and a variety of artificial fern. He touched one of the plants brazenly; its evergreen leaves were made from stiffened plastic.

The casino, and the cocktail lounge in particular, resembled a perfect Pre-War museum display. Arcade realized that he used to imagine Lucky 38 differently even though sensu stricto its interior impeccably corresponded with Mr. House’s ardent desire to recreate an ideal exquisitely conserved Vegas exhibit - refined, prosperous and equally untouched by the surrounding wasteland and its ubiquitous poverty.

From the Followers’ point was view it surely was selfish, absolutely nonsensical given the desolate predominantly irradiated world they were forced to live in and principally intolerable except it had to be perceived differently by a two hundred year old immortal recluse. Erroneous or not, Arcade could not begin to comprehend the vision behind the equivocal New Vegas’ renaissance.

H shortly joined him at the back of the lounge and leaned against the bar counter, silently eyeing the decor. He had taken his jacket off and stayed in a saggy T-shirt with such a washed out print that it would have been impossible to identify it even if any of them was knowledgeable about Pre-War fashion. In a way, H’s presence instantly made Lucky 38 seem more or less tolerable.

“Hey, look!” he exclaimed and snatched something from the counter. It was some sort of a toy or decoration: a standing globe filled with liquid with a figurine inside. He smiled at the piece as if it meant something and showed it to Arcade. 

“Test site,” he read out the red letters on the edge. “Some sort of a collectible memorabilia, I presume?..”

“Yeah, Mr. House’s a fan. It’s called a snow globe. See?.. These plastic flakes go whirly if you shake it real hard, they say there’s a whole series from before the War. Oh, wait, Jane asked to bring them in if...” H trailed off and went back to the elevator but his Securitron friend was already gone.

Two fancy black-and-red cocktail glasses were standing on the counter. Arcade bent over to smell them suspiciously and instantly choked on the strong alcohol odor. “Oh boy. I am about eighty percent certain I could safely preserve heavily irradiated specimens in this one,” he uttered hoarsely.

H snorted and shouldered him off to take a smell. “Whoa, potent hooch. Well, err, guess only the hard booze survived two centuries ageing.” He picked the glasses up and offered one to Arcade. “Cheers to the good ol’ classic of whatever and a drop of Sarsaparilla.”

“If I am to die of alcoholic intoxication… “

In a feat of admirable intrepidity they gave it a try. The drink, hardly surprisingly, went straight to the head but turned out to be quite tasty, no doubt due to the ingredients quality - Pre-War Mr. House ought to have housed nothing short of topnotch spirits menu at his casino. Pun by all means intended.

They settled down on the sofa across from the elevator doors. The lounge was an antithesis to the Aces parlour and to tell the truth Arcade liked it way more, albeit only in comparison. It was better lit and almost quiet except for the barely audible mumbling of the radio on the counter. Besides, the leather cushions turned out much softer than they looked.

H took a couple of sips and languidly slid down the back of the sofa, fidgeting with the snow globe he had brought along. The tiny flakes inside it whirled sluggishly in the thickened liquid but the figurine against the explosion background remained unmoving.

Arcade noticed a pattern in the movement of his hands; a familiar set of steady motions as though breaking down an imaginary rifle. He watched the globe turn around meditatively until H leaned forward to put the thing away on the table.

He gingerly tucked one leg under the other, trying his best not to smear white cushions with the dirt from his boots. “Thanks for going to that show with me, ‘Cade. Wasn’t sure you were gonna come but it was kinda fun in the end, huh?”

“Well, it certainly was not a total disaster.” Arcade stifled a jocose chuckle. “Save for the comedy part. That guy - not the ghoul, the other one - was simply abhorrent.”

H let out a loud snort and tilted his head on the edge of the backrest. “Tough to please, are you?..” he asked with a teasing smile.

The smile was disarmingly impish; it made his eyes brighten within the well defined outlines of puffy dark circles and deepened the thin strokes of laugh lines a little. Next to the lavish creamy-white leather he looked somewhat more flushed than his usual pallid self. Arcade watched him beam under his gaze and could not help smiling back.

The evening felt so very much like a date, and an undeniably pleasant one. Even so, or in fairness for that very reason, he was willing to play along rather than sit it out ex abundanti cautela. From what he had seen, those afraid of a little disappointment never gained anything worth keeping.

Therefore Arcade sat back with a content smirk and stretched an arm against the edge of the backrest cushions so that the unzipped Kings’ jacket would reveal the dark line of suspenders against the discoloured fabric of his shirt. “And what if I am?” He arched a brow somewhat mockingly.

H was staring right where he was supposed to be staring and even though he managed to mumble something reasonably coherent before averting his gaze it was nowhere near a straight answer. Arcade was all but sure that if he brushed the disheveled mess of blond hair away he would easily spot a pair of reddened ear tips.

The attention was appealing even if it meant little at the end of the day. He held back a satisfied chuckle and reached for a drink instead. On the second try the cocktail seemed less vertiginous, after half the glass - more Sarsaparilla-ishly root-flavored. Their glasses’ fancy black-and-red rims clinked quietly to the low mumbling of the radio in the background until there was scarcely anything left in either of them.

H settled his nape on the edge of the backrest cushion again and looked up at him with a widening cheshire grin. “Know what?.. You didn’t say the show wasn’t funny.”

They were both quite tipsy already. Arcade met the washy green gaze fixed quiescently upon him; it did not seem to matter whether he decided to answer and if yes then what exactly he had to say. He reached out a hand and blandly cupped the side of H’s neck - a meaningless gesture, not even a proper caress.

His nose was itching under the bridge of the glasses persistently even though he rarely took them off unless he was sleeping or about to kiss somebody. The timing would have been excellent, after all - an intimate moment at a secluded location, a good-looking man at his side… maybe not entirely his type, or rather not his type at all, but his type never stayed for long.

They were silent for quite a long time and by the moment Arcade realized that his company had fallen asleep against his palm it felt nothing but cruel to wake him up.


	11. IX

 

··−· ·· ·− − ·−·· ··− −··−

 

An unexpected cyclone reached Nevada around the middle of May and immediately put all the Followers’ activities on hold. Arcade had to suspend his research and securely pack all the lab equipment in plastic covers along with thumbed encyclopedias, Julie’s collection of Pre-War magazines and most of their food and clothes.

Every single thing was wet, even the air itself, and they had to squelch through the mud to get from their bunk to the nearest table, let alone walk outside in the radioactive rainstorm. It had been pouring in torrents for two days straight, and when at some point of the unscheduled rain season the old fort became too riddled with various protective pieces of wax cloth Julie finally ordered to temporarily relocate the headquarters along with the majority of the occupants to doctor Usanagi’s clinic.

Arcade considered popping Rad-X in the rain every hour or so nothing but a waste of highly valuable medicaments. Besides, he had neither need nor desire to go outside save for a few times a day and unless Julie required his help with some errand he was free to pass the surplus of his unlooked-for spare time on a pile of mattresses they had heaped up in the farthest corner of the Western guardhouse.

He seized the rare opportunity and composed several verbose letters to the family. Truth be told, Arcade hardly ever made enough time for thorough reports: there was always something more urgent, or more fascinating than narrating the humdrum. He was by far a boring person, all the more so with every passing year, but the family did not regard it as a sound excuse.

Johnson in particular was so unwaveringly wordy and eager to spin a yarn that it felt utterly unfair to palm him off with a brief two-page reply. All of his letters were so lengthy that even an abridged version would scarcely fit into an envelope.

Arcade did not keep the letters; hoarding them seemed unwise, and terribly imprudent, even though they rarely mentioned the past. They spoke of each other, and that alone posed a threat to everyone if he was to be discovered. Johnson’s letters had one remarkable quality that made letting go more bearable: the old man had a habit of forgetting what he had already written about and went over the same stories more often than not.

Back in the day Arcade used to think that it would be harder to bosom his correspondence while sharing the living quarters with another Follower but the only personal question that Julie had asked him thus far was ‘So, how should I call you?’. She was calm and professional and he could not help but like her for that.

Ever since the involuntary change of arrangements she had been occupying the vacant hospital cot downstairs, near the guardhouse entrance. Nobody else remained except for them and Beatrix who was habitually patrolling the gates in a loosely fitting oilskin. As a ghoul she was the only one completely unaffected by the negative effects of radiation.

Doctor Usanagi did not need two administrators in her clinic and maintained a certain way of managing her stuff so the reasons why Julie stayed were also relatively plain to see. In the meantime she kept herself busy decluttering the Eastern tower storage and cataloguing the inventory scattered all over the old fort, for the most part alone although she ensured to draw Arcade in every now and then.

“What a mess. The Mojave hasn’t seen such fallout since two years ago,” she huffed, violently shaking the excess water off the black umbrella with a broken crosspiece they had been using to safely force a passage to the flooded restrooms. Then she tossed it in the corner and closed the door. “If the rain doesn’t cease any time soon there's gonna be trouble. Believe it or not, last time around I had to amputate an extra toe from Bill’s…”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. No offence intended but I would rather remain in the dark,” Arcade hurried to cut in. “I admire your skill, Julie, I really do, except I am not exceptionally fond of disturbing nightmares.”

“Touchy, eh?” She tittered and picked the inventory folder up from her cot. “Sure, just don’t come a-knockin’ on my door at two in the morning if you need a second coccyx cut off.”

Arcade gave her an innocent look. “As much as I would loathe my anatomy to feature yet another redundant part, I doubt it would not wait until sunrise.”

“Touché. Okay, pass me that box first. The open one.” Julie straddled the cot and dumped the box contents in front of her. “Let’s see… Darn it, that’s typical New Vegas for you. The Garretts are sitting on enough Fixer to supply us plenty every two weeks and all they’re doing is hooking folks on chems.” She let out a small disgusted noise and shook her head disapprovingly.

They started right after breakfast and had already sorted six crates of supplies, mostly various medications delivered from the Atomic Wrangler. Julie insisted on running over the contents and comparing the numbers. Arcade would not know whether she just wanted to be thorough or suspected the twins of being dishonest. It was probably both.

By late afternoon the chems were scattered all over her cot, the littered lab table, every nearby cabinet and even the floor. Given the rates of illness and injury in Freeside the stock was bound to last for about a month or two at best although it exceeded anything that the Mojave branch of the Followers had ever packed before H came to an arrangement with the Garretts for them.

The steady supply allowed Julie to assemble a cache of crucial chems. She never allowed any of the Freeside factions inside the old fort but treated the Kings and the NCR alike if need arose. The Followers came to Nevada to enhance the locals’ quality of life in every potential way and they were doing a terrific job, especially given the circumstances.

Arcade, on the other hand, had not provided a single feasible result in almost a year. He made a number of useful discoveries along the way but neither of them brought him close to his goal, which had always been medication preservable for long-term storage. Truth be told, the same research could have easily been conducted from a comfortable laboratory back in the Boneyard. Handling perishable samples in an ebbing hope for a solution had never been the ultimate concern, and opting for it was inadequate.

He placed the next box atop the cot with unduly force; the meds inside jumped.

“You okay?” Julie shot a surprised glance at him and tossed a handful of Mentats blisters into the semi-vacant crate on the floor labelled ‘recreational use’. “Look, we don’t usually offer psychological counseling in this facility but since you’re my subordinate…" 

“I should be doing better.” Arcade pushed the glasses rim up his nose with two fingers. He left the chems alone and propped a hand on the lab table. “The whole desert is in desperate need of aid. I know you would help anyone who happened to fall over your doorstep…”

“I’d make an exception for Legion dress-ups.” Julie set a foot on the edge of the cot and raised a brow at him. “I’m a godsend, alright. What’s your point, though?”

Arcade gestured at the meds scattered around. “My research is tremendously important since this well is going to run dry eventually,” he stated. “But it is not nearly as pressing as aiding those suffering as we speak. What I am trying to say is that it’s been... some years since I last boasted proper medical practice, let alone field experience. I would be grateful if you trained me basics.”

Julie nodded right away. “Agreed. Hm, Usanagi's classes at the clinic are chiefly theoretical but check their planned operations if you’re interested.”

“That was... suspiciously instantaneous…” Arcade gave her a squinted look. “Didn't you say that nobody else was qualified for my research?”

She snorted and pointed a finger at him. “Don’t hold your breath, fella, you won’t be ditching it. We need all the able hands we can get, however. It may ring hollow but only a handful of us left the HQ with actual practice up their sleeve. Most learn as they go along.”

It hardly came as a revelation: back at the headquarters everyone received initial medical training but few pursued it as a specialization. The progressive society’s rehabilitation that the Followers had been uniformly striving towards required a variety of skill sets. Most of the brethren around New Vegas had unrelated backgrounds; Arcade was perhaps the closest match to an actual medical care student.

“Won’t say I haven’t thought about all that.” Julie passed him a bundle of Stimpaks and ran a hand through her loosely hanging mohawk. “We’re anything but frontline medics, most like myself would’ve just gotten themselves killed out there. You at least don’t have that particular problem.”

“I… suppose,” Arcade muttered warily. The statement was more baffling than worrying since he hardly ever swung the Defender around and mainly kept his nonconformity to himself. “How do I differ exactly?..”

Julie gave him a bemused look. “For one, you’ve got a hella large rifle covering your rear. A headshot a day keeps most troubles away, eh?”

Arcade let out an amused chortle. “Cannot argue with that, o fount of wisdom.”

“That I am. Look alive, it’s taking forever and a day already.” She picked up the inventory folder and her pencil; it was duct taped all over. “Ugh, couldn’t they at least sort their shipments out before sending?.. I’m not a damn storekeeper.”

The original deal with the Garretts only involved regular shipments of Med-X and homemade ethanol but the contract was changed as the months passed and eventually it called for a better inventory work than sorting bottles from syringes.

“... oor.” Arcade felt Julie nudge him in the forearm.

He tossed the aforementioned syringes in the Med-X box and looked up. “Pardon?..”

“Get the door,” she repeated. “Someone’s knocking.”

Arcade shot a surprised glance at the locked entrance. The raindrops were still sheeting against its tin plates violently; whoever decided to pay a visit in such foul weather was either a fool unfamiliar with basic self-preservation or a very unlucky halfwit. Or a ghoul, but Beatrix would have used her key.

The knocking persisted even after he opened the door; a feeble fist remained in the air and patted on his chest blandly.

“You’ve gotta be ki-...” Arcade broke off and hurriedly caught the sniper rifle in mid-air as it threatened to fracture his metatarsus. “... kidding me.”

H wavered at the threshold, clutching the door frame, hastily turned around and threw up in a muddy puddle near the entrance. He was soaked through; the water was dripping on the floor at an alarming rate, forming a growing plash.

Arcade waited until he was finished, grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled inside. The rifle strap was weighing down his shoulder but it did not feel as overburdening as the chill of worry he sensed upon looking at the poor idiot’s ashen pale face. It seemed bloodless and greyish and even though half the effect must have been from the cold it was... disturbing to see H like that. Stumbling back to the old fort through the unceasing downpour was enough of an ordeal, let alone absorbing hundreds of rads along the way.

“What the hell happened?” Arcade asked, already helping him out of the backpack straps. It fell to the floor with a loud thump.

H did not reply and only grimaced as Julie caught him by the chin and forced his face to the light. “It’s fine, just checking the reactions. Let’s get you seated, won’t we?.. Oh, right. You know what, sweep these back into the crate,” she ordered and managed to pull H’s sodden leather jacket off in no time with little help from its owner.

The clothes beneath it were just as wet. She left them on after briefly checking the abdomen and pushed H on the cot as soon as Arcade cleared it. They both watched her closely as she checked his eyes and gums and proceeded with expertly palpating the lymph nodes on the neck. Julie did not comment on the process but it was comprehensible either way.

She did a regular stethoscope check up, gave a satisfied hum and gently nudged H on the shoulder. “Alright, lie down now, mister. No unnaturally disgusting disfigurement as of yet so I’ll go get some RadAways for you. Tell your pal Arcade here if you took any chems. No withholding.”

Julie struggled with the stuck umbrella for a short while and stepped outside.

H stretched out on the cot obediently, covered his eyes with a shaking hand and let out a soft groan. “Ugh… head’s spin… ning.”

The sight of him was verging on cadaverous. Arcade took him by the other arm, wiped the raindrops from the Pip-boy screen and turned it on. The vitals tab was hard to miss since it was the first one to appear; the thing kept a three-day background log and was able to provide some additional data upon pricking into the skin. He could not be sure if the process was entirely sterile but decided not to question the advanced engineering behind the Vault-Tec gizmo as long as it proved operational.

He skimmed through the existing statistic and activated the needle. H winced but did not try to take his arm back.

“Well, this is surely… above the norm…” Arcade muttered at the rads readings. He let go of the Pip-boy and rubbed his brow with a tired sigh. “How did this even happen?.. don’t answer, it was a rhetorical question... When did you last take any chems?”

H swallowed hard and splayed both palms on his eyes to put a feeble barrier between them and the light of the exposed bulb hanging from the ceiling. “Uh… a… a RadAway… last night or so, only had one… and, uh, three?.. three pills. I think.” He hardly sounded certain.

“Which pills?..”

“Rad-X. Didn’t have more… it was okay till, uh, till passed out… for some time. Won’t tell for sure,” H mumbled and let out a shaky sigh.

Arcade deduced that the long row of idle pulse measurements he had noticed in the Pip-boy log must have belonged in that time frame. Fortunately, about four hours in the rain after a handful of pills would not be enough to develop a second coccyx, much unlike a debilitating case of interstitial pneumonitis.

Julie returned with a spare Followers uniform - save for a signature lab coat and the boots - and two IV bags filled with bright orange substance. She dried her hands on the shirt hem, swiftly rubbed them together and touched a palm to H’s forehead. “Damn, you’re boiling. Alright then, this is for right now and the night. I’m thinking two-three more later on… we’ll see. No recent RadAways, right?”

“None that I was informed of.” Arcade shook his head.

The last thing they needed would be an accidental overdose. Getting addicted to a radiation-purging treatment per se was not completely impossible but diagnosing such an addiction in the first place seemed tricky. After all, the symptoms were almost indistinguishable from radiation poisoning. Vomit, nausea, headaches, abdominal pains… possibly hair loss although very few cases in the Followers’ practice proved severe enough.

“Fine by me.” Julie looked H over and offered a hand to help him sit up. “Come on, fella, let’s get you changed into something dry before you congeal all over...”

H groaned, trying to steady himself on the edge, but amenably pulled his drenched T-shirt off and dropped it on the cot with a splat. Arcade knitted his brows at the shapeless patch of a laser burn spread across his bruised shoulder but did not have enough time to scrutinize it. The lesion seemed relatively recent even though it was half-healed already. Venturing into the desert was perilous, they were both well aware of its dangers way before they met, yet H seemed misguidedly unconcerned about his own safety and well-being. 

Arcade, on the other hand, appeared just as misguidedly concerned about it. He huffed and folded the damp clothes into a neat pile atop the cot.

Julie shot a quick glance at it and hummed doubtfully. “Your leathers might last through it, just soak them in RadAway overnight or something… the rest is gotta go. Wait, let me help you with this.” She stepped in and expertly buttoned up the lower part of H’s shirt while he was struggling with the upper.

“Uh… thanks. I’m… how do you guys, uh, move in these pants...” He awkwardly shifted his bare feet and faltered visibly with a sharp inhale. “Oh crap... I’m seeing s… so many colours right now...“

His voice sank to a whisper and then to a barely audible ‘oh’. Arcade hastily supported him by the shoulders; those were shivering feverishly under the thin fabric of the shirt. He looked up at Julie with growing concern. “Someone better lie down.”

She nodded. “You put him on a drip. I’ll wrap the inventory up and clean all this slop. Don’t worry, he’s gonna be fine. Besides, you wanted some war times practice.”

Arcade did not reply. He knew that the comparatively light stage of radiation sickness was hardly lethal or even uncommon. The optimal dose of RadAway brought fever to naught over time, all the sooner if the body was allowed to rest. It was also a far cry from frontline medicine, of course, since the Legion was not using nuclear weaponry - not yet, at least.

Unduly or not, Arcade only felt his shoulders relax when he finally prepared the IV. H did not get in the way but was staring at him with the most unintelligent expression during the whole procedure. He was probably just giddy again; either way, it did not interfere with introducing the catheter into the vein at his elbow.

“It may burn a little,” Arcade warned, opening the line. “Hold still.”

“Sorry,” H mumbled and quit kneading his hands. They were crooking spasmodically from time to time, and his shivering was verging on rigors despite two layers of blankets and thick bighorner wool socks they bought from Miss Trudy during the last visit to Goodsprings.

Arcade secured the catheter with a couple of ancient tape pieces and carefully hooked the RadAway bag onto the empty bookshelf above the mattress pile he courteously vacated. Beatrix would have probably let H have her bed since she had been friendly with him and opposed regular sleep as a concept but the reasonable thought was belated to occur. Semper idem.

“How are you feeling?” He shifted on the edge of the mattress and took both algid hands in his, rubbing them steadily atop the blanket. He had never been very skilled, or rather overly interested, in alternative medicine and only knew a couple of pressure points but it was still better than nothing. The hardest part was not to tug at the IV tubing too much.

H kept quiet for quite some time aside from occasional sharp gasps when his hands flinched in pain. “Like shit,” he admitted in a while. “Uh, how do I look?..”

Arcade chuckled. “Same. Better than earlier, though. The RadAway should help but tell me if nausea or headache increases.” He waited for a feeble nod and glanced down; the blood circulation in H’s hands was restoring gradually. They did not feel warm yet but acquired a healthier shade from all the kneading.

It was not the best time for questions so Arcade did not ask what happened. It was probably the same old case of lucky versus unlucky, whatever that meant in truth. H was drifting off, or at least warmed up and relaxed enough to stop shivering, so he was going over the bones of his hands and arms to keep entertained. Up and down, left and right. First in English, then in Latin. The former all derived from the latter anyway. Os triquetrum, os hamatum.

“I’m not gonna die, am I?..” H asked hoarsely all of a sudden and made an effort to open one bloodshot slightly teary eye. It stared at Arcade with an unclear expression.

“What?..” He raised his head and stared back in surprise. The glasses slid down the bridge of his nose at the motion; the black rim lapped over the line of sight. “No, of course not. Julie is the best doctor around, you are in good care.”

H nodded twice and carefully withdrew his hands, drawing both blankets up to the chin. He fell asleep very soon, curled up on the side, and did not wake up even as Arcade deftly took out the IV catheter when its bag emptied. The next one required a four to six hour interval to pass so he carried the neglected rifle and the rest of H’s stuff upstairs, utilized his sleeping bag since it was a fair thing to do and went back to burning daylight.

Julie came to check up on them in a few hours and brought some food from the storage - likely the last of mutfruit and corn the Followers were to see any time soon since the rainstorm remained unceasing. Arcade was hardly an expert on horticulture but it seemed obvious that even if the crops would not be annihilated by the downpour, the rads in it would consequently make them inedible.

H was sleeping most of the time, in large part due to the combination of RadAway effects and his fever. He managed to stagger outside during the night - his boots left fresh stains of dirt on the floor - but mostly woke up for a quarter or so at best and dozed off again whenever his strength oozed away.

He was still looking rather febrile the next day yet all the less sallow since Arcade had put him on another drip later in the evening. Around noon, there were three of them in the room: the rain ebbed a little during the day and Julie stepped in for Beatrix at the gates. She loathed being confined within four walls, much unlike most of her subordinates.

H was awake but he was lying on his side and watching Arcade studiously make Latin notes on the empty pages of his Legion journal. Half his face was hidden behind tumbled hair so it was impossible to figure out whether he was actually paying attention or just following the neb of his pencil absently.

Beatrix was sitting on her bed with shoes on and lazily flipping through a terribly flimsy copy of ‘Dean's Electronics’. Arcade had met few ghouls in his life, let alone in Nevada. Just like one would expect from a two hundred year old person, she was exceedingly patient, often inert and chary of idle movement. Unfortunately, she was also profoundly uninterested in medicine and science alike and did not want to expatiate upon her physiology.

The necrosis of body tissues as such would be of more interest to a pathologist; Arcade was eager to learn about systemically low effect of chems on ghoul bodies. He pried what he could out of doctor Henry but the old man usually forgot about things the same moment he was done researching them. His interest in ghouls only lasted one project and to tell the truth it was far too specific to be remotely fascinating.

H started tossing over on his mattress pile noisily and stretched out with audible cracking of joints. “I’m so done slugging,” he bemoaned softly. “But I can’t… ugh… tired…”

“Fatigue and muscle pains are common symptoms of many illnesses.” Arcade briefly turned around to run an eye over him. “Besides, you got yourself exposed to a great deal of radiation and the treatment is not a mild one either. Feel free to stumble away whenever you desire but I would recommend staying where you are for a couple of days.”

"Don’t you doctors have a chem for such crap?..” H buried his face in the blankets with a miffed sigh.

He was being hilariously grumpy rather than genuinely unwell ever since his temperature lowered back to normal. The vestigial radiation still remained along with a regular case of feeling worn out and his energetic nature was having a hard time dealing with it.

Arcade gave his dishevelled nape an amused smirk before going back to his studies. “Sure we do, plenty of them.” He slowly finished the abandoned paragraph under the accusatory stare and closed the journal with the pencil still inside. “Although strictly speaking there is no need for any additional medication at this point. You just need to rest.” 

“But I’m aching.” H scowled at him from under the blanket.

“Is that so? Then try to think ahead the next time you decide to take a radioactive bath.” Arcade let out a loud harrumph. “You are currently only handling immediate irradiation effects. An acute poisoning would be obscure until every body orifice started bleeding.”

"Uh..." H portrayed a mix of clueless and genuinely disturbed. “Every?..”

“Technically, ‘any’. Hardly a desirable condition, anyway. A lethal one, as well. Do not bother telling me it is none of my business, I will not apologize. You are going to get your reckless ass killed. Or ghoulified.” Arcade frowned reproachfully.

Beatrix looked up from her book with a rasping guffaw. “How exactly? Detonate an atom bomb?”

“Somehow. This one is a rare specimen,” he insisted.

The rare specimen sank his head on the crumpled pillow and let out a faint chuckle. It came out alarmingly cracked; Arcade studied his haggard appearance for a spell, moved onto the mattress pile next to him and stretched out a hand to turn on the Pip-boy. There was a small mark from the IV catheter surrounded by a blooming red bruise right above its case, and perhaps a scattering of needle prick speckles underneath it. The vitals were fine save for the heightened heart rate.

Arcade felt a firm touch against his bare wrist just below the shirt cuff and a tickling callus on the index finger where the trigger used to chafe it. He raised a brow inquisitively. “And what is this supposed to mean?”

H scarcely left any room for guesswork as his hand clasped around Arcade’s unabashedly to pull it close. “If I’m that rare a specimen then why don’t you study me?” he teased. Somehow it still sounded more like a benign joke than an attempt at flirtation.

“Pfft, what a dum-dum. Give him a chance, hon, and he’ll take you to pieces,” Beatrix grunted. “And shove those under that shiny lens of his.”

“Give me a break! I only asked for a piece once and it had already fallen off,” Arcade resented and shot an indignant look at her. “You cannot possibly have been planning on reattaching it, Miss Russell.”

H stared at them in confusion for a spell and shamelessly burst out laughing. “Holy crap, ‘Cade! That’s so rude.”

Arcade felt the catching quivering of his hand and stifled a mistimed chuckle. “Rude? I hardly think so,” he disagreed. “But I never meant to act inconsiderately. And I did say I was sorry.”

His former apology was apparently insufficient for the wounded party. Beatrix’s milky-white eyes were still glaring at him incredulously. It was neither a good place nor time to continue the conversation but Arcade did not want not leave the presumed advances hanging. He looked down at H’s thumb slowly making its way underneath his cuff and turned their hands over to return the squeeze.

“You know that I only handle fresh samples.” He slightly raised the corner of his mouth in a half-smile, standing up. “So get better soon.”

In a few minutes he was already putting up the damp umbrella to slip outside. He squelched across the yard and tarried on the way back to prepare some food - ghoulishly patient or not, Beatrix would eventually become bored with her magazine and leave. The age-long expired tins of Cram made a decent stew if mixed with a handful of mashed tatos for sauce, some carrots and an unhealthy amount of pepper to give the meaty mash a resemblance of pleasant taste.

Julie came along when he was stirring the reasonably stenchful result on the hot plate. They divided the stew in half since Beatrix had never eaten with the Followers to begin with and H was being forced to famish during his anti-radiation treatment.

He was already sleeping when Arcade came back to torment his arm with the last RadAway catheter. Those were neither detachable nor intended for multiple uses: the IVs were initially designed as a conveniently portable solution rather than the only one. In case of a serious poisoning it resulted in an immoderate number of needle pricks, a severe bruise and a sore arm. 

H showed no likeness to his usual wakeful self whatsoever until late in the evening when his unsteady form all but toppled over Arcade’s stretched legs on the way to the stairs in the dark; he was already half asleep by then and only moved his feet slightly in the warm inside of the sleeping bag.

The following morning sounded a lot like quiet rustling of a bristly brush repeatedly scrubbing the bore of a sniper rifle. Arcade rolled over with a stifled groan and sat up, fumbling after his glasses.

The rustle did not cease but when he finally put them on H was smiling at him a little guiltily. “Mornin’. Didn’t mean to wake you up.”

He was sitting cross-legged with his back against the wall amidst the scattered rifle parts and looking notably better than the days before despite the overall scruffy appearance. Given the strength that was required to unclasp the parts and strip Snipey for cleaning, he must have been feeling alright as well.

“You seem obnoxiously energetic,” Arcade managed to mumble between the yawns and ran a hand through his uncombed hair. “And uncharacteristically refreshed.”

“Turns out getting high on RadAways guarantees plenty of naps.” H grinned and hesitantly returned to scouring his rifle. “Um, 'Cade… I’m sorry my dumbassery made you worried.”

It caught Arcade off guard. “I was not worried,” he said defensively but the falseness of that statement was far too obvious. “Well… maybe a little.”

H spinned the cleaning rod in his fingers. “Alright then. I’m sorry my dumbassery made you a little worried. I mean, thanks for helping me and not scolding me too much. Wouldn’t dawdle all the way here if I knew the rain was a lasting thing.”

“I know. Now, no point in dwelling on it.” Arcade finished lacing up his boots and shrugged. “Are you hungry?”

H’s stomach echoed the question with a low murmur. “Ugh, you ask. Gimme two minutes to put her back together and I’ll help.” He hastily screwed the cap onto the oil tin and wiped the grease from his hands with a soiled cloth. Both his negligently rolled up sleeves slid down from the motion.

Arcade waved him off. “Stay. I think I can handle a hot plate.”

“Signal if you need me.” H gave him a wink and snorted cheerfully at the sour reaction. 

It was still too cold to sit outside even though the rain had finally stopped. They huddled on either side of Snipey’s girthy frame on the rumpled bed and stayed there till nightfall when Julie came by to inform them that the rest of the Followers would be getting back from the clinic in the morning.

H did not wait for everyone to show up. He was gone long before the gates opened, and so was his eyebot. He did not mention whether he was planning on coming back any time soon but Arcade considered a rifle-sized bundle stashed underneath his bunk an answer clear enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Take care of yourselves and your doctors.


End file.
